The Sound of Thunder (24 page)

Confine a number of men in a small space and they’ll get round to it in under ten minutes.

This company had a vast experience in matters pornographic.

A sergeant had served three years in Bangkok, but it took him two hours to convince his companions that what rumour placed horizontally, nature, in fact, had maintained at the vertical. He carried his point only after an expedition down the corridor from which he returned with another old China hand. This expert produced photographic evidence which was studied minutely and deemed conclusive.

It served also to remind a corporal who had done a tour of duty in India of his visit to the Temple of Konarak. A subject which was good for another hour and paved the way for a smooth entry into a discussion of the famous Elephant House in Shanghai.

They kept it up from noon until nightfall.

In the meantime, Saul had lost interest in the cards and taken a book from his bag and started reading. Sean was bored. He cleaned his rifle. Then he picked his teeth with a match and stared out of the window at the small herds of springbok that grazed along the line of rail. He listened to a detailed account of the pleasures provided by the proprietress of the Elephant House, and decided to give it a wide berth if he ever visited Shanghai.

“What am you reading?” he demanded of Saul at last.

“Huh?” Saul looked up vaguely and Sean repeated the question.

“The Westminster system of Government. ” Saul held the book so that Sean could see the title.

“Jesus!” grunted Sean. “What do you read that stuff for?

“I am interested in politics,” Saul explained defensively and returned to reading.

Sean watched him for a while then,

“Have you got any other books with you?”

Saul opened his bag again. “Try this.”

“The Wealth of Nations ” Sean handled the book dubiously.

“What’s it about?” But Saul was reading again.

Sean opened the heavy volume and glanced idly at the first page.

He sighed with resignation for it was a long time since he had read anything but a letter or a bank statement-then his eyes started moving back and forth across the page like the shuttle of a loom.

Without knowing it, they were weaving the first threads into a fabric that would cover a part of his soul which until now had been naked.

After an hour Saul looked across. “What do you make of it?

he asked.

Sean grunted without looking up. He was completely absorbed.

This was important. The language of Adam Smith had a certain majestic clarity. With some of his conclusions Sean did not agree but the reasoning evoked a train of thought in Sean’s own brain, stimulating it to race ahead and anticipate sometimes correctly, but often reaching a point wide of where the author was aimed.

He read quickly, knowing that he would go back and read it all again for this was only a scouting party into the unknown territory of economics. With his eyes still fixed on the pages, he groped in the pockets of his tunic, found a stub of pencil and underlined a passage to which he wanted to return. Then he left it and went on. Now he used the pencil frequently.

“No!” he wrote in the margin at one place.

” Good,” at another.

Saul looked up again and frowned as he realized Sean was defacing the book. Then he noticed Sean’s expression, saw its scowling concentration and his own face relaxed. He watched Sean from under lowered eyelashes. His feeling for this man of muscle and moods and unexpectedly soft places had passed affection and now reached the borders of adulation. He did not know why Sean had placed protecting wings above him.” nor did he care. But it was good to sit quietly, no longer reading, and watch the face of this big man who was more than just a friend.

Alone in the midst of a multitude they sat together. The train snaked northwards across the grassland, spreading a long trail of silver-grey smoke behind it and the sun sank exhausted to the earth and bled on to the clouds. After it was gone the darkness came quickly.

They ate canned meat spread on coarse bread with the blade of a bayonet. There was no lighting in the compartment, so after they had eaten they sat together wrapped in their blankets and talked in darkness. Around them all other conversation died and was replaced by the sounds of sleep. Sean opened one of the windows and the cold sweet air cleaned their minds and sharpened them so that they talked in quietly suppressed excitement.

They talked of men and land and the welding of the two into a nation; and how that nation should be governed. They spoke a little of war and much of the peace that would follow it; of the rebuilding of that which had been destroyed into something stronger.

They saw the bitterness ahead that would flourish like an evil weed nourished on blood and the corpses of the dead, and they discussed the means by which it should be rooted out before it strangled the tender growth of a land that could be great.

They had never spoken like this before. Saul hugged his blankets about his shoulders and listened to Sean’s voice in the darkness. Like most of his race his perception had been sensitized and sharpened so that he could pick up a new quality, a new sense of direction in this man.

I have had a hand in this, he thought, with stirring of pride.

He is a bull, a wild bull, charging anything that moves; charging without purpose, then breaking his run and swinging on to something new; using his strength to destroy because he had never learned to use it in any other way; confused and angry, roaring at the barbs in his shoulders; chasing everything and as a consequence catching nothing.

Perhaps I can help him, show him a purpose and a way out of the arena.

And so they talked on into the night. The darkness added another dimension to their existence. Unseen, their physical forms no longer limited them and it seemed that their minds were freed to move out and meet in the darkness, to combine into a cushion of words that carried each idea forward. Until abruptly, the whole delicate pattern was shattered and lost in the concussion of dynamite and the shriek of escaping steam, the roar of breaking timber and glass, and the confusion of equipment and sleeping bodies thrown violently together as the train reared and twisted and plunged from the tracks. Almost immediately a further sound blended into it all-the crackling of musketry at close range and the steady hammering beat of a Maxim machine-gun.

Sean was pinned helplessly in the complete darkness, unable to breathe under an immense weight. He struggled wildly, tearing at the men and baggage above him, his legs bound by loose blankets. The weight eased enough for him to drag air into his lungs, but a knee was driven into his face with such force that his lip burst open and the blood oozed saltily into his mouth.

He lashed out and felt the stinging rake of broken glass along his arm.

In the darkness men screamed in terror and in pain, leading the hideous chorus of groans and oaths and gunfire.

Sean dragged his body free of the press, felt men thrashing under him as he stood.

Now he could hear the repeated splintering thud of bullets into woodwork much louder than the guns that fired them.

Someone reeled against him and Sean caught him.

“Saul?”

“Leave me, let me go.” A stranger, Sean released him.

“Saul. Saul. Where are you?”

“Sean. ” “Are you hurt?

“No. ” I “let’s get out of here.”

“My rifle.”

“Bugger your rifle.”

“Where’s the window?”

“Blocked.”

At last Sean was able to get some idea of their situation. The coach was on its side with the windows against the earth and the whole welter of dead and broken men piled upon them. The door was high above them, probably jammed.

“We’ll have to break out through the roof. ” He groped blindly, then swore and jerked his hand back as a splinter of wood knifed up under a fingernail, but he felt a draught of cold air on his face.

“There’s a hole.” He reached out again eagerly and felt the torn timber. “One of the planks is sprung.”

Immediately there was a rush of bodies in the darkness, hands clawed at him as half a dozen men fought to find the opening.

“Get back, you bastards. ” Sean struck out with both fists and felt them connect. He was panting and he could feel the sweat sliding down his back. The air was heavy with the body warmth and breath of terrified men.

“Get back. I’ll work on it.” He forced his hands into the crack and tore the loose plank out. For an instant he struggled with the temptation to press his face to the narrow opening and suck in the clean air. Then he locked his-hands on to the next plank, braced his legs against the roof and heaved back with all his strength. It wouldn’t budge. He felt the panic mounting in him once more.

“Find me a rifle, somebody, ” he shouted above the uproar.

“Here. ” Saul’s voice, and the rifle was thrust into his hands.

He ran the barrel into the opening and using it as a lever flung his weight on to it. He felt wood tearing, moved the barrel and pulled again. It gave and he cleared the plank and started on the next.

“all right. One at a time. Saul, you first.” With his panic just below the surface. Sean shoved each man unceremoniously through the jagged opening. A fat one stuck and Sean put a boot behind him and pushed. The man squeaked and went out like a champagne cork.

“Is there anyone else?” he shouted in the darkness.

“Sean,” Saul’s voice from outside. “Get out of there.”

“You get under cover,” Sean roared back at him.

The Boer fire still flailed the wrecked train. Then he asked again. “Is there anyone else?” and a man groaned at Sean’s feet.

Quickly Sean found him. Hurt badly, his head twisted. Sean cleared the tangle of baggage from above his body and straightened him out. Can’t move him, he decided, safer here until the Medicos come.

He left him and stumbled over another.

“Damn them,” he sobbed in his dreadful anxiety to get out.

This one was dead. He could feel the reptilian clamminess of death on his skin, and he left him and scrabbled his way out into the open night.

After the utter blackness of the compartment, the stars lit the land with a pearly light and he saw the fog of steam hanging above the locomotive in a high, hissing bank, and the leading coaches telescoped into each other, and the others jack-knifed and twisted into a weird sculpture of destruction. At intervals along the chain a few rifles winked a feeble reply to the Boer fire that poured down upon them, “Sean, ” Saul called from where he was crouched beside the overturned coach. Sean ran to him and lifted his voice above the clamour.

“Stay here. I’m going back to look for Mbejane.

“You’ll never find him in this lot. He was with the horses listen to them.”

From the horse-boxes at the rear of the train came such a sound that Sean hoped never to hear again. TWo hundred trapped and frenzied animals-it was far worse than the sound of those men still in the wreckage.

“My God! ” whispered Sean. Then his anger rose higher than his fear. “The bastards,” he grated and looked up at the high ground above them.

The Boers had chosen a place where the line curved along the bank of a river. The watercourse cut off escape on that side, and on the other the ground rose steeply in a double fold that commanded the full length of the railway line.

Along the first fold lay their riflemen, two hundred of them at least, judging by the intensity of their fire, while from above them on the summit ridge the muzzle flashes of the Maxim gun faded and flared as it traversed relentlessly back and forth along the train. Sean watched it hungrily for a moment, then he lifted the rifle that he still carried and emptied the magazine, firing at the Maxim.

Immediately the flashes grew brighter as it came questing back to find him, and around Sean’s head the air was filled with the swishing crack of a hundred whips.

Sean ducked down while he reloaded, then stood up again to shoot.

“You bastards,” he shouted at them, and his voice must have carried for now the riflemen up there were helping the Maxim to search him out. They were getting very close.

Sean crouched down once more, and beside him Saul was firing also.

“Where did you get the rifle?”

“I went back for it.” Saul punctuated his reply with gunfire and Sean gritmed as his fingers fumbled with the reload. “You’re going to get hurt one day, ” he said.

“You taught me how to go about it, ” Saul retorted.

Once more Sean emptied his magazine to no effect, except that the recoil of the rifle invoked the old high madness in him.

It needed only Mbejane’s voice beside him to trigger it completely.

“Where the hell. have you been?” Sean demanded.

“My spears were lost. I spent much time finding them in the darkness. ” Sean was silent for a moment while he peered up at the ridge.

Out of the left there was a gap in the line of riflemen where a narrow don ga ran through them and down towards the railway.

A small party might be able to go up that gully and pass through the rear of the Boer firing-line. From there the solitary Maxim on the ridge would be very vulnerable.

“Bring your spears, Mbejane.

“Where are you going?” Saul asked.

“I’m going to try for that machine-gun. Stay here and keep these gentlemen’s minds on other things.

Sean started off along the train towards the outlet of the don ga

He covered fifty yards before he realized that not only MbeJane but Saul was with him.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

“With YOU’ The hell you are!

“Watch me. ” There was that peculiar note of obstinacy in Saul’s voice that Sean had come to recognize, and there was no time to argue.

He ran on until he was opposite the don ga where again he sought shelter in the lee of an overturned coach while he made his final assessment of the position.

The don ga looked narrow but deep, and the scrub-bush that filled it would give them cover to the top where there was a definite gap in the Boer line.

“It’ll do, ” he decided aloud, and then to the other two,