by Peter Rimmer
Billy Clifford could not make up his mind whether to write the book as fact or fiction. To further his career as a journalist he needed the prestige of a well-received book. A history of the conflict in Africa from a writer who had lived through the war would give him the stature among his peers that would last months and be forgotten when the next crisis sent the writers of the world scurrying somewhere else. Fact stayed where it was, a reference for future historians, Billy a footnote in someone else’s book. Fiction, good fiction, lived forever.
For months, Billy had been secretly studying the people involved in the conflict so that when he sat down at his desk back in Ireland, the replay of the pictures from his mind would be as real as they had been in the flesh. Home in Dublin he would carve in stone the war that had raged around him for so long.
The long bar at the Criterion Hotel in Johannesburg’s Jeppe Street was a lonely place for men away from home. The barman had retreated to a stool in his corner and the only other man on the same elbow of the bar was easy to study without making it obvious. The man looked like a defeated Boer with the old slouch hat on the bar unclipped to its side. Billy could see the sweat stains where the hat had touched the owner’s head, the wide brim cleaner, a lighter brown.
Every time the man wanted a drink he lifted a finger. The man had neither spoken nor moved from his stool.
Mentally stealing the man’s features, Billy put his age at nearer forty than thirty; the face had a tough, leathery texture from too many years in the African sun, the hair bleached white, the hands rough from manual work, the part of the eyes that Billy could see a pale blue; the man’s shoulders were powerful. The trousers had leather patches home-sewn to protect the insides of the thighs; the leather waistcoat was mottled and coloured grey and unbuttoned, the skin soft and pliable; on the man’s feet were high leather riding boots such as the Boers wore on commando.
The notes of conflict, the points that shared nothing with a defeated Boer, were the long, almost white ponytail that hung down the man’s back and the fact he was cleanly shaven.
Lost in his reverie, Billy stared past the man’s right ear.
“Didn’t your mother tell you, old boy, that it’s rude to stare?”
“You’re not a Boer,” said Billy in surprise. “What’s that waistcoat made from?” he asked loudly.
“The skin of a baby elephant. At a time when I didn’t know any better, I killed its mother and father for their tusks. You ever killed anything, Irishman?”
“No. I’m a journalist.”
“Good.”
“They have a good table I hear. Would you care to take supper with me? My name is William Clifford of Dublin. Everyone calls me Billy.”
“Sebastian Brigandshaw, from Rhodesia. Most people call me Seb.”
The walls of the dining room were panelled with dark mahogany. The silver on the white, heavily starched tablecloths was heavy. Candelabra sat in the centre of their round table burning three candles. There were three other tables occupied in the room and soon after they sat down, a group of British officers took the table next to them. They all gave Seb’s dress code a stare.
“I don’t have formal clothing,” he explained to Billy. “Em and I don’t dress for dinner. Some of the newer farmers make a whole paraphernalia out of keeping up appearances. They think if they don’t they will stop being British. Some of them dress up the blacks to make them look more like English servants. Keeping up the standards and all that rubbish. Look a prize bunch of fools if you ask me, stuck out there in the middle of the bush. More likely to have a wild animal knock on the door than another Englishman. What the hell does it matter what you look like if there’s no one else to see? I have a mind to ban mirrors right across the world. Stop people staring at themselves. Vanity and pride, Billy Clifford, are terrible things. After the war, this management will throw me out dressed in the skin of an elephant. For the moment I hope we are safe.”
At the long table next to them the six young officers got to their feet. A man with a drooping moustache, a bright red nose and red cheeks sat himself down at the head of the table. The colonel who sat down next to the grey-haired man surprised Billy by waving at their table.
“My brother James. We try not to greet each other in public. The man next to him, I suspect, is the head of British Intelligence. My new employers. They want me to run around in the bush, find the Boer generals who won’t stop fighting and talk some sense into them. There’s one in particular they call the Giant.”
“How do they think you are going to do that?”
“I can follow a trail at the gallop. Nothing clever. After years, anything broken or turned in the bush sticks out like a beacon of light. The wind eventually discounts the normal and registers the change.”
“Do you speak Afrikaans?”
“Yes.”
“He speaks perfect English, the Giant. Gave him his name. Took the photograph of General Gore-Bilham in his underpants.”
“Why do they go on fighting when they know they can’t win?”
“There are many reasons and none of them the reasons they give out. They call them Bittereinders, and that’s the only part that is true. They are bitter but mostly for all the wrong reasons. I understand them. We have bitter men in Ireland. The Boers think we Irish sympathise with them, two nations who have felt the yolk of the British Empire. Mostly they are men with grudges, men with nowhere to go, who for the first time in their lives have found a home in a cause, found themselves among like-minded friends. And they don’t want to give it up. All the patriotism is an excuse for not wishing to face the reality of their lives. In wars, men who would have been failures become heroes. Most of the men out there in the bush don’t want to lose the one time they mean something in life. Some of them may be patriots. Some of them may have political ambitions. Some of them just can’t find an honourable way out. For most, it has become a way of life that they like. A young dead man doesn’t have to face his responsibilities. Maybe some are just very brave men. You can take your pick when you talk to them if they’ll talk to you. If you are a threat, they will kill you. Gore-Bilham wasn’t a threat, so they took down his trousers and made him a fool… Why doesn’t your brother come across and talk to us?”
“Not in public. Father pays him an allowance which, even though the cause of the problem is dead, James thinks he will lose his money if he talks to me and father gets to hear. Money is everything to people like my brother. Fact is, it’s everything to most people. So I’m not going to jeopardise his inheritance by making a fuss.
“Now, seeing you talked me so easily into having supper I want you to tell me what has really happened in this war. I want to know about the concentration camps where women and children are dying by the thousands. Kitchener has burnt down most of the Boer farmsteads, I understand. The British wish to extend universal franchise from the Cape to the Transvaal and the Free State which would give the blacks and Uitlanders the vote and turn the Boers into a minority with no political influence. The British, I suspect, want one southern African country from the Zambezi to the Cape under British rule. Rhodes, I know, plans a British railway line from Cape Town to Cairo from which British power will enforce law and order, Christianity and trade… The man’s father’s a parson. You are the one with the knowledge, Mr Clifford. In return, I will be happy to relate a few bush anecdotes for your book. Now, when is your paper going to expose the horror of these camps to the public at home? That behaviour, if it is true, is quite unacceptable to Englishmen… Oh, and don’t get me wrong. It’s far nicer to have supper with someone else than eating on one’s own. There are two things people should avoid doing in life: eating or drinking alone.”
“Do you like farming?”
“Yes, I do. Isolation has the advantage of avoiding other people’s poison, the poison that is in their heads turning everything to be looked at from their own perspective, their own point of view. A farmer’s problems are the basis of life and the closeness to nature is simil
ar, I think, to the closeness some people feel to God. I understand the Boer with his land and his Bible. Once I asked my brother the priest whether God was nature or nature, God. Within each of us is the nature that made us, the evolution of the species. The priests will tell us that God is in each one of us. In the bush, nature follows us and watches us, whether a butterfly or a lion. I am constantly reminded of great beauty even out of the rainy season when the bush crackles in the dry but nothing living moves in the heat of the day. I can sit on the banks of an African river and be full of joy watching the animals and the birds, just being part of nature. If nature is God, Mr Clifford, I am a very religious man.”
“You are lucky to have found what you want. Very few of us do.”
“Which is why this war must be brought to an end so the Boers can go back to being what they were in the first place, farmers.”
“Do you think the white man should have brought to Africa his mission from God and his medicine?”
“No. He should have left it to natural evolution. Life becomes too complicated when you play around with the laws of nature. A short, sweet life is better than a long and ugly one. Never interfere with nature. I rather think it is tantamount to interfering with God.”
“A lot of men think they are gods.”
“And all of them are wrong.”
They were the last to leave the restaurant and go to their rooms; James, Colonel Hickman and their party had left soon after eating their meal. Billy and Seb had shaken hands at the foot of the stairs, ships in the night never expecting to talk with each other again. When Billy came down to breakfast, he was told that Mr Sebastian Brigandshaw had left at dawn with the newly promoted Colonel Brigandshaw and six troopers of the Mashonaland Scouts. The tall, blond man had been dressed in civilian clothes, the rest in uniform. And no, Mr Sebastian Brigandshaw had not left a forwarding address. Disappointed in losing such a good source of information, he cabled his newspaper in Dublin and by late in the afternoon was reading their reply. His editor had also heard rumours of concentration camps and he was told to make a full investigation and take photographs.
With meticulous and devious care Billy Clifford went about finding out where the British Army was herding the Boer women and children before setting out on another of his long journeys alone into the veld. At night it was freezing cold but this time he was organised with the right equipment and slept under the layers of crystal clear and twinkling stars better than he had slept on the lumpy and curved mattress in the Criterion Hotel, the sleeping bag, thick with lamb’s wool, pulled up to his nostrils, the hood down to his eyebrows. Each night by his fire he looked up at the great dome of heaven that was too vast for his mind to comprehend. Most nights he heard the bark and snort of wild animals but after a full day in the saddle, and with the fire bright as protection, not even the roar of an occasional lion could keep him awake.
At the first camp, the rows of graves told a bitter story. Most of the mounds were short and small of width, some the size of a shoebox. The names were burnt onto wooden crosses. Billy counted seven Bothas, one large, the size of any grave in Dublin, the rest smaller and smaller down to the one the size of a shoebox.
Inside, the British let him look in at the huts, squalid and mostly dirty, but if there were any inmates able to speak English, none were willing to talk to the Irish Times, despite Billy’s show of horrified sympathy. There were no military doctors or nurses. Even the guards were apathetic. Whatever they did was not enough to prevent the spread of disease among a people who for generations had lived in isolation on the veld.
Everyone blamed everything on the war. “There’s a war on, mate, ’ain’t you ’eard?” was the common refrain. “Two of my mates are also buried on the veld,” said a private. “Soon as the buggers stop fightin’ we can all go ’ome, can’t we? Stands to reason. Far as I’m concerned this lot can go ’ome right now, but the sarge says they wouldn’t last a week on their own. The blacks, the sarge says, them blacks’ll take revenge for chasin’ ’em off their land. Stands to reason. Go and tell Smuts and Botha to stop fightin’. Not my bleedin’ fault they die of measles. What made the silly bugger come out ’ere in the first place? Sarge said they were running away from the Catholics, whoever they are.”
“I’m a Catholic,” said Billy.
“Then it’s all your bleedin’ fault, ain’t it? Stands to reason. All I know it ain’t my bleedin’ fault. You sweat it out in the sun during the day and freeze your balls at night. And without the missus.”
While Billy was visiting his second camp with the same result, Seb cut the spoor of the Boer commando. After careful inspection of the trampled ground, he looked up at his still-mounted brother.
“Two hundred plus horses. No wagons. Crossed yesterday. The ants have burrowed up again and covered bits of the track. The flies have lost interest in the horse dung. No moisture. Thirty-six hours. You want to follow?”
“Of course. You want to talk to them, remember?”
The troop was sixty miles as the crow flies south of the small town of Vereeniging, six miles over the Vaal River. James’s intelligence had been right. The Giant was making a foray into the Free State. The target had to be the railway line to Johannesburg.
The black stallion Jeremiah Shank had called Diamond was a poor replica of the animal that had left the farm in Rhodesia. Constant movement and lack of winter grazing had left all the animals undernourished and half their normal weight. The dirty, ill-kept men in tattered clothing were also skeletons, the only thing clean being their Mauser rifles and the eyes of the Boers who were ready to shoot them. Any fat on Tinus Oosthuizen that left Kleinfontein in the Cape had long been spent. Some of the men walked beside their horses to conserve the animals’ strength. Magnus du Plessis walking next to Tinus had not spoken a word all morning, though he regularly checked their position by the position of the sun. Tired, exhausted men easily rode round in a wide circle finding their own tracks a day later. The exact position of the two hundred-horse commandos at a specified time was as essential to the campaign as the men and guns and Tinus used every skill he had learnt in his long years as a hunter to bring his men to the rendezvous with de Wet and Smuts. Then they would hit the British, replenish their food and guns and bombshell into small groups throughout the Free State bush. The full raid would amount to fifteen hundred men and the small British garrison could not withstand an attack of such magnitude.
On the wall map, Colonel Hickman again moved the position of the Mashonaland Scouts. In the town of Kroonstad, a highly armoured train was ready to move north while a brigade of mounted infantry stood ready to ride three miles into the bush. Their first orders had been to ride into the Free State for the small town of Lindley where British Intelligence falsely rumoured that the will of the wisp, General de Wet, was resting his commando. Outside Parys, a small town on the Vaal River, two brigades of Scots Cavalry were ready to ride at a moment’s notice. Between the Scots and the mounted infantry, Hickman controlled a brigade of Australians, whose job was to look as visible as possible. Behind James Brigandshaw, the Scots Cavalry and the mounted infantry ran a thin line of copper wire giving Hickman his control. The Australians patrolling the railway line were as much bait as protection. With Sebastian Brigandshaw following the Giant like a bloodhound and accurately assessing his speed and direction, the colonel was beginning to enjoy himself. Next to him in the control room, General Gore-Bilham sipped brandy from a large balloon glass with a look of satisfied retribution. This time he was the cat and Tinus Oosthuizen the mouse.
“Are you quite sure the commando ahead of Brigandshaw is the Giant?” he asked for the third time.
“We had a report he was in the area but it doesn’t matter. They will all join forces to make an attack. Follow this one close enough and all of them will come together. When we kill or capture Oosthuizen, de Wet and Smuts, the war will be over. Botha and de la Rey will surrender.”
“They’ve backtracked on their own spoor,” said Sebastian
. “The weight of the print is going the other way. Look, you can see that hoof mark is on top of the one more heavily indented. The horses are unshod. Then horsemen dismounted and went back again after the detour to muddle their direction. The destination has not changed but they are now no more than twelve miles up ahead. I will now go on alone. They will think me a messenger from de Wet or Smuts.”
“Follow them with us until the morning. Then you can go alone. Far better we bring in the army and you can talk to their general when he is under armed guard.”
“No, James, I will then be his enemy. We will make camp in those trees. Tomorrow, then.”
“Tomorrow, then,” said Magnus du Plessis. “It all comes together tomorrow. At noon, all three commandos attack the British garrison at Kroonstad and burn it to the ground. Tonight we sleep. I am both terribly tired and terribly excited.”
James had placed the guard next to the horses. Sebastian smiled to himself in the dark. The moon would be up in half an hour. Tomorrow was a full moon. They really did think him a fool. Even if Billy Clifford had not described his friend over dinner, a verbatim and professional journalist’s report of an interviewed British soldier who had seen the Giant, Seb had known since Harry’s letter from Cape Town. Tinus, away from Kleinfontein, had joined the war. Every move to cover their tracks of the horsemen up ahead had been explained to Sebastian time and again. The direction of the Boer commando was on a specific course of an intersection and only a man who had hunted the bush most of his life would know how to navigate day and night to make a rendezvous at an exact time. There was no doubt in Sebastian’s mind the Boer leader up ahead was his partner, Tinus Oosthuizen.
Ten minutes before the moon came up, Seb made his move. The Scouts and James were asleep around the fire and the single guard next to the horses was relieving himself with his back to the fire. The man had been told to watch the horses by Colonel Brigandshaw but even if he had counted the sleeping bodies around the fire, he would still have made the number seven: Seb, before vanishing in the night, had filled his sleeping bag with handfuls of dry, springy grass.
