by Peter Rimmer
“Now, Fran, be a good girl and go and have my son quickly. I’m in a hurry.”
The words were the first after the guests had left the wedding reception that had flowed out onto the lawns between the rose gardens.
Keeping her temper, Fran swore never, even in the heat of the moment, to reveal the father of her child; there was too much at stake; her time would come. There were a lot nastier ways of making a fortune than marrying Jeremiah Shank. Or so she told herself.
“Who’s the father?” asked Henry. They were sitting under the msasa trees with the new baby on grandfather’s lap. George was at his feet on the grass playing with the fox terriers and Madge had gone off on her own, bored with the adult conversation after the first excitement of seeing her grandfather. The ridgebacks were furiously digging up separate holes in among the cannas while the gardener was watering the flowerbeds with a hose fed by the windmill pump that cranked water from the Mazoe River. There had been no rain since the end of March and none was expected until October. The garden, watered by the river and Henry Manderville’s ingenuity, was a blaze of colour.
“Gregory,” said Emily.
“Are you sure?”
“Quite sure. Women talk, Father. Once the army let Gregory back into uniform, it made him a man. Fran was so proud of it. Funny thing is, she was so looking forward to him coming home and finding her pregnant.”
“Then why was she living with Jeremiah Shank?”
“I don’t know. After two months of Gregory leaving she just never came home.”
“So Jeremiah thinks he is the father?”
“You think she would tell him a lie?… What are you laughing at, Father?”
“Greg would have appreciated the irony. Well, she’s not the first person in history to hedge her bets.”
“You think she would do something like that?”
“Money speaks louder than words and wars are dangerous. The way we behave is never the way we are taught to behave and we are rarely as nice as we would like other people to think… When will Seb be back from the lands?”
“When the sun goes down.”
Part 6 - The Bittereinders
1
September to October 1900
The British patrol reached Majuba farm at the end of September with orders to bring in anyone alive and burn the farmhouse to the ground. Lord Kitchener was no longer willing to let the Boer commandos find sustenance on their own farms. Without the farms, he reasoned, the Boers would be completely cut off and surrender; guerrilla war was a war of attrition which he was going to win, carving the bushveld into blocks, building blockhouses and fences and, like flushing grouse on a Scottish moor, beating the bush until the starving Boers ran into the fences to be cut down by machine-gun fire from the blockhouses. If the Boers would not surrender and behave like any civilised man when he lost a war, Lord Kitchener would scorch their earth so dry not even a grasshopper would find a living.
Sarie, working in the main house to prepare a meal for the old woman who had given up on everything including life, saw her dogs trot off with their tails between their legs. By the time Sarie heard the horses, the dogs were well past the gum trees. Smiling to herself, she wondered if there were enough vegetables in her kitchen garden to make the Boer commando a vegetable soup. The men always craved vegetables after eating dried meat in the saddle for weeks. Three times now they had visited Majuba farm and never stayed longer than a night. The men were thin and smelled of unwashed clothes but there was never enough time to do more than cook them a soup before they saddled up to keep ahead of the khaki. Only Cronjé commissars had taken all their food.
Looking out of the window still smiling to herself, she came eye to eye with a British lance-corporal.
“No horses,” shouted a private from the stables.
The corporal smiled with satisfaction; there were going to be no bad surprises on this farm.
Leaving the food to burn on the stove, Sarie and the twins were forced into a horse-drawn wagon with the old woman who had not said a word. Sarie patted the wrinkled hand, thankful her dogs had had the sense to run off into the bush. The last two things she saw as the wagon rolled down the road, past the gums and out into the veld, was the bitch watching her from a hide, well hidden, while the first red flames of fire went up from the farmhouse and the outbuildings.
Kei’s odyssey had taken him from the banks of the Limpopo to the banks of the Orange River, chased one time by the British, then by the Boers, his own people scattered to the four winds by the flames of war, until he finally decided to go home. To the north of the Limpopo were Matabele trying to kill him for the induna’s head-ring tucked inside his knapsack, and elsewhere the ravages of war had stripped normality from the lives of everyone. For Kei, it was like living in a nightmare without the ability to wake up. The world of men had only the urge to kill each other.
Blackdog saw the tops of the gum trees on the horizon first and sniffed the air for confirmation. For the first time since leaving home, Kei felt his heart lift at the thought of family and friends. He would never find the gold of Lobengula so there was no point in thinking about that anymore. Alone he had left and alone he returned in the late September evening.
From the back of his horse, it was possible to see the burnt buildings long before they reached the gum trees. At the gum trees, the bitch came out to sniff the bottom of her offspring, mother and son wagging their tails as they circled each other. The three dogs watched from a distance. Kei called out if anyone was there. The sound dissipated in the silence. Dismounting at the row of huts that had been his home, he kicked at the burnt walls and the debris of fallen roofs, the iron roofs black from the fire. After half an hour of searching, Kei was convinced there was no sign of his family, dead or alive. On the bench under the mango tree, he began to cry like a small boy for his mother until Blackdog put his head in his lap and looked at him with all the understanding of having been there many times before.
Stroking the head of his dog, he got up from the bench feeling better.
“No point in staying here, Blackdog, no point at all.”
Getting up into the saddle he turned the horse towards the far hills where Karel had killed the buck and rode into the dusk. Behind him followed Blackdog, the bitch and the three dogs. Somehow Kei was whistling.
For three months the two brothers had kept themselves out of the war, living off the bush as best they could, avoiding people. They had made camp in the hills they had known since childhood and watched the smoke rise from what had once been their distant home. Long before Kei rode up into the hills they had saddled up. From the distance, it was impossible to tell whether Kei was Boer or British. The dogs trailing behind the lone horseman were hidden by the long brown grass. In their haste not to be seen, Karel and Piers were only concerned with the danger from behind and were not watching the bush and birds for signs of danger.
The man on the big horse blocking their way was a giant with a full beard, mostly grey but with a hint of chestnut. The long, tangled hair was matted. The man and horse were perfectly still, the penetrating stare of the blue eyes bringing Karel up in his tracks. Behind the giant were seven horsemen. The elephant gun held by the giant was pointed at Karel’s belly. Behind Karel, Piers swore out loud.
“That’s good, you speak the Taal,” said the horseman. “Deserters?”
“There’s someone coming up behind us.”
“It’s a black man and five dogs. Don’t you have field glasses? Who did you desert?”
“We escaped after Cronjé surrendered. Behind us is our farm. The British burnt it to the ground ten days ago. They took our mother. There was nothing we could do. We were in the hills.”
“Why were you not on the farm?”
“The khaki had come before and I killed one of their men. They were wearing hats like you. All except the officer. I tried to shoot the officer first but killed the man behind.”
“I must teach you how to shoot.”
“
We have been hiding for three months.”
“Then now you can stop hiding. There is a British unit building a blockhouse to the west of these hills, in the plain. There are soldiers guarding them. What is your name?”
“Karel Oosthuizen and this is my brother, Piers.”
“I am also Oosthuizen. Martinus Oosthuizen but people call me Tinus.”
“Are you the white hunter?”
“I was many years ago.”
“And your father was also Martinus?”
“You seem to know me, son?”
“You are our uncle. Our father, Ezekiel, was killed at Paardeberg, and was your brother.”
The camp was fenced with wire and inside the wire were tents and the stench of too many people living too close together. Sarie helped the old woman out of the wagon and kept a firm hand under her elbow. They had been moving towards this place of desolation since leaving Majuba farm burning behind. Even in the slums of Pretoria, among the poor whites, she had never seen worse conditions. They were being herded into the camp like chickens. In tent thirty-four there were already three families of women and children and every one of them looked starving. Even Sarie with her ability to survive anywhere was going to find this British concentration camp a challenge.
“The first thing we do is keep clean,” she said to the three of them huddled in their corner of the tent. “In Pretoria, the people who were slovenly died of illness long before they starved. We will catch our own water off the side of the tent and no one will eat without washing their hands. If there is no water, cleanse them in the soil, Mrs Oosthuizen. You are now my responsibility and I will not allow you to die, however the British wish to punish us.”
That night, before she slept on the hard ground, she knew what it felt like to be locked in a cage. When she woke in the morning, one of the children was dead in the opposite corner of the tent.
They were downwind and the stench of war washed over them making Billy Clifford dismount so he could be sick into the long dry grass. The British patrol had found the copper wire cut, sprung into a coil and shining in the light of midday. It was hot, and the sweat mingled with his vomit in the grass. Within seconds, flies were feeding off the disgorged content of his stomach, making Billy heave again, sending a sharp pain up from his coccyx. The vultures had long been on the ground and the only sign of life was a lone man on a horse riding away from the half-built blockhouse. As the horseman rode out of the long grass some half-mile ahead, Billy shook his head to clear his vision and put the field glasses to his eyes, adjusting them carefully for range.
“I was right,” he said to the captain. “There’s a small pack of dogs following that horse.”
“Wild dogs. Probably kill the man and the horse in the end. He’s black. Scavenging. Poor sods are getting their end of the wedge.”
“You’re wrong on one thing. Those are not wild dogs. There’s one upfront of the horseman and it’s leading the way.”
“You feel better, Clifford? After nearly a year out here thought you’d be used to it.”
“It’s the smell. Makes me realise what we are when we die. Dead meat.”
“You don’t believe in God, sir?”
“I come from Ireland, Captain Menzies. I have to believe in God.”
The pattern had been the same for weeks. The British soldiers were dead, their stores looted. Even the searchlight had been to no avail. There were four men still alive, one without a scratch who had hidden under the bodies of his dead comrades.
“A bloody great giant he was, with another not much smaller. Come out of the ground in broad daylight. We was working we was. Puttin’ the blocks in place when all ’ell let loose. Never even saw the buggers till they was on us. Crawled up they ’ad in bloody daylight. Came up right out of the ground over there.”
“How many, soldier?” asked Captain Menzies.
“A dozen, maybe less. My rifle was down on the ground. Didn’t ’ave time. That bloody giant shot three of my mates right through the head. They were gone in ten minutes. I watched ’em. Running with what they could carry into a fold in the ground and when they came out of the other side they was ridin’ horses.”
“And the black man?”
“’Im and his dogs was lookin’ for food.”
“So they weren’t wild dogs?”
“Not likely. The black dog came and licked my face. I was pretendin’ dead.”
“You’re lucky to be alive.”
“Bleedin’ right I am. Anyone got a fag? Those bloody Boers ran off with the cigarettes.”
While they were burying the dead, Billy sat on a rock in the shade of the only tree within three hundred yards of the half-finished blockhouse. Someone had repaired the copper wire and he could hear the Morse code being tapped out to Kitchener’s headquarters. For a long while he stared at the blank sheet of paper and then, with the writing pad comfortably rested on his right knee and his pencil licked in contemplation, he began to write his article for the Irish Times. He was pleased with his headline.
‘A war feeding off itself breeding hatred for a hundred years.’
After he sent his column down the same copper wire, the Giant was on his way to becoming a living legend.
By the end of the week in Europe, every newspaperman was asking the same question: ‘Who is he?’ The one that found out first would have his column syndicated right around the world.
Billy wrote article after article. In the camps across the highveld, the Boer women and children were herded in even greater numbers towards their destiny and the earth was scorched again. Chivalry and honour, even the reason for the war, had long been lost and Billy understood. The British had done it all before in Ireland. Or, as he said in his articles, man had done it all before and would do it again and again to the end of time: the one crop, the one crop that never failed was the one that was sown with the seeds of hatred.
Tinus watched the rocky slopes with the trained eye of a hunter. Red-tipped aloes grew between the craggy rocks and lower down where the topsoil had collected in cups of rock, small trees clumped together feeding in the shallow soil. There was not a sound, the land was empty. Patches of white cloud stood motionless in a blue sky, and then over the high hills of the Soutpansberg, a pair of martial eagles flew down the slope to the Sand River, lifting on a thermal halfway towards Tinus. The white-bellied birds rose high in the sky calling their kee-wo-ee. It was perfect leopard country and Tinus wondered how many pairs of yellow eyes were watching.
Next to the river, the men of the commando were hanging their cartridge belts from the lower branches of trees. The saddles were on the ground, the horses drinking from the river. All the animals were English horses, the Boer ponies having perished in the pain of war. The one Tinus rode had been Jack Jones’s favourite, the stallion that had sired many of Jeremiah Shank’s remounts sold to the British commissary. The stallion was jet black with one white blaze on its chest in the exact shape of a diamond. Jeremiah himself, always superstitious, had bought him at a sale in Kimberley; they had called him Diamond. Tinus, equally superstitious, had not given the animal a name in time of war. After searching the countryside for the third time he dismounted and led the stallion down to the river. While the horse drank, Tinus removed the animal’s tack, leaving his Mauser against a tree within easy reach. Then, rifle at the trail, he walked the riverbank looking for crocodile.
“Someone watch the river,” he called. “I’m going in.” For the first time in weeks, Tinus was going to get himself clean.
As he sank into the flowing river, Magnus du Plessis saw there was not a trace of fat on his neighbour’s naked body. Holding his Mauser ready to fire into the water he searched the opposite bank for crocodile as the rest of the commando stripped and ran into the river. Piers was the first to dive headfirst into the water. They were sixty, maybe seventy miles he estimated, from the Limpopo River, further away than he had ever been from his Franschhoek farm.
When Tinus had washed the private crevices of
his body, he floated on his back and forgot he was fighting a war. Then he smiled and let his mind go back to his early life north of the Limpopo in the land of Lobengula, King of the Matabele. As he drifted downriver, he could see the great fat-bellied tyrant in his armchair under the jackalberry tree and the pots of maize beer being offered to the king. Then he thought of Alison and the children and his mind snapped back to the war, worrying about the other men’s families in the concentration camps set up by the British to deny the Boer commandos the supplies from their own farms. Then the guilt of his family’s safety disappeared when he remembered the price he would pay if caught by the British. There was only one sentence for a rebel. They would hang him by his neck until he was dead. The sharp crack of the Mauser brought him back to reality. He had floated more than a hundred yards downstream. Magnus du Plessis was running along the bank firing, stopping and firing into the water around his body. Then Tinus began to laugh at the absurdity.
“You’ll bring every khaki for miles,” he shouted, splashing the water.
“Bugger the khaki. There was a nine-foot crocodile halfway up your ass. Get out of the bloody water.”
With powerful strokes, Tinus began swimming against the current with Magnus swearing at him from the bank.
“I know what it is,” he said to Magnus when he got out of the water where the men were making camp. “I feel I’m almost home.”
“Your home is a thousand miles away in the Cape.”
“I don’t think so, friend. My home is across the Limpopo River and I only found out just now. This is the real Africa. Eagles, crocodiles and swimming bare-arse in the river.”
