The Sound of Thunder (19 page)

That single shot broke the spell. Gunfire crackled in hysterical unison and the frieze of khaki figures along the trench exploded into violent movement as the bullets, thudded amongst them. At that range most of Jan Paulus’s burghers could be trusted to knock down four running springbok with five shots. In the few seconds that it took the English to dive into the trench, at least fifty of them went down, dead or wounded, and lay sprawled against the red earth.

Now there were only the helmets and heads above the parapet to shoot at and these were never still. They ducked and weaved and bobbed as Woodgate’s men fired and reloaded, and seventeen hundred Lee-Metford rifles added their voices to the pandemonium

Then the first shell, lobbed from a field gun on the reverse slope of Conical Hill, shrieked over the heads of the burghers and burst in a leap of smoke and red dust fifty feet in front of the English trench.

A lull while Jan Paulus’s heliograph team below the crest signalled the range correction to the battery, then the next shell burst beyond the trench; another lull and the third fell full upon the trench. A human body was thrown high, legs and arms spinning like the spokes of a wagon wheel. When the dust cleared there was a gap in the parapet and half a dozen men frantically trying to plug it with loose rock.

Together all the Boer guns opened. The constant shriek of big shells was punctuated by the @icious whine of the quick-firing pompoms.

And once again a mist covered the peak, this time a thin sluggish mist of dust and lyddite fume which diluted the sunlight and clogged the nostrils and eyes and mouths of men for whom a long, long day had begun.

Lieutenant-Colonel Garrick Courtney was damnably uncomfortable.

It was hot in the sun. Sweat trickled down under his tunic and moistened his stump so that already it was chafed. His field-glasses magnified the glare as he looked out across the Tugela River to the great hump of the mountain four miles away.

The glare aggravated the ache behind his eyes, which was a memorial to last night’s drinking.

“Woodgate seems to be holding very well. His reinforcements should be up to him soon enough.

Sir Redvers, Buller appeared to be satisfied, and none of his staff had any comment to add. Stolidly they stood and stared through their glasses at the peak which was now faintly blurred with the dust and smoke of battle.

Garrick was puzzling once more the devious lines of authority which Buller had established for the attack on Spion Kop. Comanding the actual assault was General Woodgate, who was now “holding very well” on the peak, yet Woodgate was responsible not to Buller but to General Charles Warren, who had his headquarters beyond Trichardt’s Drift where the column had crossed. Warren was in turn responsible to Buller, who was well back behind the river, standing on a pleasant little hill called Mount Alice.

Everyone on the staff was aware that Buller hated Warren.

Garrick was certain that Warren had been given command of an operation which Buller considered very risky, so that in the event it failed Warren would be discredited and goaded into resigning.

Of course, if he succeeded, Sir Redvers Buller was still supreme Commander and the credit would therefore ac rue to him.

It was a line of reasoning Garrick found easy to follow, in fact, had he been in Buller’s position he would have done exactly the same.

This secret knowledge gave gary a deal of satisfaction, standing beside Buller on the dope of Mount Alice he felt very much in tune with him.

He found himself hoping that Spion Kop would soon be a bloody slaughter-house, and that Warren would retreat across the river in disgrace. He remembered the occasion in the mess when Sir Charles had referred to him as an “irregular, and a damned colonial irregular-at that! ” Garry’s fingers tightened on his field-glasses and he glared out at the mountain He was so deep in his resentment that he hardly noticed the signaller who came running from the mule wagon that housed the field telegraph which connected Buller’s headquarters with those of Warren beyond the river.

“Sir! Sir! A message from General Warren. ” The urgency of the man’s tone caught all their attentions. As one man the entire general staff lowered their glasses and turned to him.

“Let’s have it then, my man!” Buller snatched the sheet of notepaper and read it slowly. Then he looked up at Garry and there was something in those pale, bulging eyes, a pleasure, a conspiratory gleam that made Garry almost grin.

“What do you make of that, Courtney? ” He handed the sheet across and waited while Garry read it.

“Message from Colonel Crofton on the Spion Kop. Reinforce at once or all is lost. General Woodgate dead What do you suggest. Warren. ” “It seems to me, sir,” Garry spoke slowly, trying to mask the fierce jubilation he felt, “that Sir Charles Warren is on the verge of panic.

” “Yes, that’s the way it looks.” Buller was openly gloating now.

“I would suggest sending him a message that will stiffen him, sir.

“Yes, I agree.” Buller turned to the signaller and began to dictate. “The mountain must be held at all costs. No withdrawal. I repeat no withdrawal. Reinforce with Middlesex and Dorset regiments.”

Then he hesitated and looked around his staff. “What do you know of this fellow Crofton? Is he the right man to command on the peak?”

There were non-committal sounds of negation from them until A’Court, Buller’s ADC, spoke up.

“Sir. There is one excellent man up there-Acheson-Colonel John Acheson. You remember his showing at Colenso? ” Buller nodded thoughtfully and turning back to the signaller he went on with his dictation. “You must put some really good hard fighting man in command on the peak. Suggest you promote Acheson to Major-General.

In front of the trench the grass was flattened by the repeated counterattacks that had swept across it, stained by the blood of those who had dragged themselves back from the Boer positions along the crest, and littered with the twisted corpses of those who had not.

Every few seconds a shell exploded along the British line, so there was a continual moving forest of bursts and the shrapnel hissed like the flails of threshing giants.

John Acheson forced himself to his feet and climbed on to the parapet and shouted,

“Come on, lads. This time they’ll not stop us!”

In the trench below him the dead and the wounded lay upon each other two and three deep, all of them coated with a layer of red dust. The same red dust coated the faces that looked up at him as he shouted again.

“Bugler, sound the charge. Come, lads, forward. Take the bayonet to them. ” The bugle started to sing, brassy and urgent. Acheson hopped like a gaunt, old stork from the parapet and flapped his sword.

Behind him he heard laughter from a dozen throats, not the laughter of ordinary men, but the chilling discord of insanity.

“Follow me, Follow me!” His voice rose to a shriek and they scrambled from the trench behind him. Dusty spectres with bloodshot eyes, smeared with dust and their own sweat. Their laughter and their curses blended with the babbling of the wounded, outstripped it and climbed into a chorus of wild cheers. Without form, spreading like spilled oil, the charge flowed out towards the crest. Four hundred men, staggering through the dust-storm of shellfire and the tempest of the Mausers.

Acheson stumbled over a corpse and fell. His ankle twisted with a shock of pain that jolted his dulled senses. He recovered his sword, dragged himself up and limped grimly on towards the rampart of boulders that marked the crest. But this time they did not reach it to be thrown back as they had before. This time the charge withered before it had covered half the distance. In vain Acheson waved them forward, yelling until his voice was a hoarse croak. They slowed and wavered, then at last they broke and streamed back down the open bullet-swept slope to the trench. lbars of frustrated anger streaking his dusty cheeks, Acheson hobbled after them. He fell over the parapet and lay face down on the corpses that lined the trench.

A hand shaking his shoulder roused him and he sat up quickly and tried to control the breathing that shuddered up his throat.

Dimly he recognized the man who crouched beside him.

“What is it, Friedman?” he gasped. But the reply was drowned in the arrival of another shell, and the delirious shrieks of a man wounded in the belly in the trench beside them.

“Speak up, maul” “Heliograph message from Sir Charles Warren,”

shouted Saul. “You have been promoted General. You are in command of the peak. ” And then with a dusty sweat-streaked grin he added: “Well done, sir.

Acheson stared at him aghast. “What about General Woodgate? ” “He was shot through the head two hours ago

“I didn’t know. ” Since morning Acheson had known nothing that was happening outside his own small section of the line.

His whole existence had closed down to a hundred yards of shrapnel-and bullet-swept earth. Now he peered out at the holocaust around him and whispered,

“In command! No man commands here! The devil is directing this battle.”

“Sir Charles is sending up three more battalions to reinforce us,”

Saul shouted into his ear.

“We can well use them,” Acheson grunted, and then,

“Friedman, I’ve sprained my ankle. I want you to lace up my boot as tight as you can-I’m going to need this foot again before the day is done. ” Saul knelt without argument and began working over his foot.

One of the riflemen at the parapet beside him was thrown sideways.

He fell across Acheson’s lap, and from the wound in his temple the contents of his skull splattered them both. With an exclamation of surprise and disgust Saul pulled back and wiped his face, then he reached forward to drag the body from Acheson’s legs.

“Leave him. ” Acheson prevented him sharply. “See to that boot.

” While Saul obeyed, Acheson unwound the silk scarf from around his own neck and covered the mutilated head. It was a wound he had seen repeated a hundred times that day, all of them shot through the right side of the head.

“Aloe Knoll,” he whispered fiercely. “If only we’d taken Aloe Knoll. ” Then his tone dulled. “My poor lads. And gently he eased the shattered head from his lap.

“They are ripe now, let us pluck them!” With five hundred of his burghers Jan Paulus had left the shelter of Aloe Knoll and worked his way forward, crawling belly down through the jumble of rocks, until now they were crouched in a line along a fold of dead ground below the false crest. TWenty yards ahead of them was the right-hand extremity of the English trench. They could not see it, but clearly they heard the incoherent cries of the wounded; the shouts of

“Stretcher-bearer!

Stretcher-bearer! ” and

“Ammunition boys, here!” and above the splutter of musketry, the continuous metallic rattle of breech bolts reloading.

“You must signal to the guns, Oom Paul,” the burgher next to him reminded him.

“Ja, ” Jan Paulus removed the homburg from his head and waved with it at the fat mound at Aloe Knoll behind them. He saw his signal briefly acknowledged and knew that the order to cease fire was being flashed by heliograph to the batteries.

They waited, tensed to charge, a long line of men. Jan Paulus glanced along them and saw that each man stared ahead fixedly.

Most of their faces masked by beards of fifty different hues, but here and there a lad too young for this work, too young to hide his fear.

Thank God my eldest is not yet twelve, or he would be here.

He stopped that train of thought guiltily, and concentrated his whole attention on the volume of shellfire that raged just ahead of them.

Abruptly it ceased, and in the comparative silence the rifle-fire sounded strangely subdued. Jan Paulus let the slow seconds pass, counting silently to ten, before he filled his lungs and roared: Vrystaat! Come on the Free Staters!”

Echoing his cry, yelling wildly, his burghers surged forward over the crest on to the English flank. They came from so close in, seeming to appear as a solid wall from under the English parapet, that the momentum of their charge carried them instantly into the depleted line of shell-shocked, thirst-tormented and dazed Lancashires. Hardly a shot was fired, and though a few individual scuffles rippled the smooth onward flow of the charge-most of the English responded immediately to the shouts of

“Hands Op! Hands Op! ” by throwing down their rifles and climbing wearily to their feet with hands held high. They were surrounded by jubilant burghers and hustled over the parapet and down the slope towards Aloe Knoll. A great milling throng of burghers, and soldiers spread over fifty yards of the trench.

“Quickly!” Jan Paulus shouted above the hubbub. “Catch them and take them away.” He was well aware that this was only a very localized victory, involving perhaps a tenth of the enemy.

Already cries of

“The Lanes are giving in!” “Where are the officers?”” “Back, you men,” were spreading along the English line. He had planted the gerni of defeat among them, now he must spread it through them before he could carry the entire position. Frantically he signalled for reinforcements from the Boer positions along the crest, hundreds of his burghers were already running forward from Aloe Knoll.

Another five minutes and complete victory would emerge from the confusion.

“Damn you, sir! What do you think you’re doing!” The voice behind him was impregnated with authority, unmistakably that of a high-ranking officer. Jan Paulus wheeled to face a tall and enraged old gentleman, whose pointed grey whiskers quivered with fury. The apoplectic crimson of his countenance clashed horribly with its coating of red dust.

“I am taking your men hands-up away. ” Jan Paulus struggled gumnally with the foreign words.

“I’ll be damned if you are, sir.” Leaning heavily on the shoulder of a skinny little dark-haired man who supported him, the officer reached forward and shook a finger in Jan Paulus’s face. “There will be no surrender on this hill. Kindly remove your rabble from my trench!

“Rabble, is it!” roared Jan Paulus. Around them the Boers and the British had ceased all activity and were watching with interest.