The Brigandshaw Chronicles Box Set

by Peter Rimmer

  Once the moon came up and he had taken his position from the stars, Sebastian began the mile-eating jog of the Zulus. Even in the moonlight he never lost the spoor of the horse commando. Many of the cuts in the ground made by the hooves of the horses were easier to see than in daylight, the moon-shadows throwing regular patterns that were as easy for Sebastian to follow as a railway line. Once he tripped and fell, rolling with his rifle and bruising his hip on his water bottle. With the big bush hat back on his head, Seb ran on into the African night.

  Half an hour after the sun came up Colonel Hickman, back in the control room after a restful night’s sleep, was handed the message from James Brigandshaw.

  Our man has flown the coop. Suspect he knew all along. I will follow the spoor myself.

  When General Gore-Bilham arrived after breakfast, Colonel Hickman kept the wire to himself.

  “Can we let the decoy train go?” asked the general cheerfully. He had eaten a good breakfast and was feeling pleased with himself… The man, of course, would be hanged by the neck as a traitor.

  “Worst crime in the world, turning on your own people,” he said out loud. “Biting the hand that feeds them. Treason, Hickman. Worst crime in the world. Can’t have our own people turning on us, now can we?”

  Not wishing to probe the general’s mind, Hickman agreed with him. ‘Problem is,’ he thought, ‘he’s one of them, not one of us.’ Then he thought how true the words of Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of all England, had been: ‘It’s only treason if you lose.’

  The second message from Colonel Brigandshaw was short and to the point.

  Lost the spoor.

  “We have a problem,” he said to Gore-Bilham, who was pouring a cup of tea.

  Having chased a phantom spoor that had more to do with a herd of buffalo than a horse commando, James Brigandshaw admitted to himself that not only had he lost contact with the Giant, he was lost and would have to ride back on his own copper wire. Making temporary camp in a clump of trees, he cursed underestimating his brother. For a moment he felt a twinge of jealousy. Sebastian’s partner was more of a brother to him than his own family.

  The argument had gone on all night and through the day as Tinus and Seb walked side by side next to the black stallion, only the sick in the commando riding the best of the horses. Their time and position were perfect for the rendezvous.

  Seb had waited for the moon to go down before penetrating the Boer camp. He had come upon the camp three hours after leaving his grass-stuffed sleeping bag.

  When Tinus woke up from a restless sleep Seb was gently blowing on his ear.

  “Good morning, Tinus,” he said in English.

  “We’re not hunting tonight.”

  “No, but people are hunting us. Wake up slowly, my friend. This is not a dream and I’m not a ghost. Your men are very tired and easy to crawl past.”

  “Something wrong, general?” called the man next to them in Afrikaans.

  “No problem,” answered Seb in the same language.

  The British net began to close just after General Gore-Bilham had eaten his lunch. He was enjoying a cigar with his after-lunch brandy. The Scots were in pursuit of de Wet, and the Mounted Infantry had found the tracks of Smuts. Only the Giant was lost to the British somewhere in the bush. By teatime, the Mounted Infantry and the Scots had lost the fresh spoor but Hickman had made up his mind.

  “They’re after the garrison at Kroonstad,” said Colonel Hickman to General Gore-Bilham.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. That’s no fortified British camp.”

  “I want the Mounted Infantry to fall back on Kroonstad.”

  “And leave a hole in the draw net? Don’t be so bloody stupid.”

  “There are only three hundred men at Kroonstad.”

  “With machine guns and artillery. Hickman, you’ve lost your mind. You intelligence wallahs are always thinking of something. In India, we didn’t have an intelligence department. Far better. No distractions.”

  Once again, Colonel Hickman kept his temper. ‘And what happened in the mutiny?’ he said to himself.

  “Many of my burghers are from the Cape,” said Tinus Oosthuizen. “The British will try them for treason. Can you guarantee they won’t, Seb? Of course you can’t. The only thing we know how to do is go on as we are. The women and children are now a British responsibility. There’s nothing we can do.”

  “Surrender. For God’s sake surrender.”

  “Would you surrender if the whole British people were at stake? If the Boers lose political control, they lose their nation, their language, everything they have been for two hundred and fifty years in Africa. Give the Transvaal and Free State independence, Cape Boers immunity and we can all go back to living side by side with the British.”

  “I have come a long way to plead with you.”

  “Seb, too many people have killed each other. The goodwill of two white races together in Africa has gone. The Boers will hate the British for a hundred years. And don’t come back to me about my mother and Alison. I am a Boer. For now, Sebastian, you are my prisoner. I cannot jeopardise my men by letting you go. Or better, my friend, will you fight with us?”

  “You know I can’t do that however much I understand.”

  “When we attack, you can make a run for your British lines.”

  “Tinus, please.”

  “There’s no please. This is war.”

  “It’s also a trap. De Wet and Smuts are being shadowed.”

  “How do you know about de Wet and Smuts?”

  “The British aren’t as stupid as you would sometimes like to think. They have their own intelligence sources. When I found your spoor I reported your direction.”

  “How?”

  “They pulled a line of copper wire behind us. They have been tracking you like a wounded buffalo. Either surrender and get the war over or make a run. I know there are two brigades of Scots Cavalry. The Scots Guards, Tinus. Some of the best soldiers in the world. And they are fresh. And so are their horses. Get out before they pull the noose around your neck. Now. You made a fool of Gore-Bilham and he’s the one after you.”

  “Then he’ll hang me anyway.”

  “If you surrender with de Wet and Smuts there will be a peace agreement. Gore-Bilham is not the British government. Many people in England have had enough of this war. They have a respect for so few fighting the whole bloody empire. If you surrender, your women and children will stop dying in the camps and I don’t think the British would hang a soldier who surrenders voluntarily. If that isn’t enough for you personally, disperse your men and go north into the bush. What about Alison and your children?”

  “What about my people? You think Barend would ever look at me if I ran away?”

  Colonel James Brigandshaw had waited for the night sky to guide him home. Never again would he allow his compass to be carried by anyone but himself, let alone his brother. Within half an hour of telling Colonel Hickman Seb had flown the coop the wire had gone dead, and when they had tried to follow it back, they found one severed end but not the other. An animal had snared the copper wire, broken loose and run off with the other end caught in its foot. After three hours of fruitless search in the long elephant grass, they had made a second camp and waited for the night sky and the beacon of the Southern Cross.

  Once they had found familiar ground they slackened pace, letting the horses take their own speed, jogging gently through the long, brown grass that came to their knees. The open plain gave way to foothills and a pass that would take them through the low range of hills. Once James struck the railway line on the other side of the hills, he would find the headquarters laager of Gore-Bilham and Hickman and be in time to take part in the encirclement of the three Boer commandos at the place he suggested they would rendezvous. The pass took them through a gap wide enough for a wagon and when they came out to look down on the small valley, they found it crowded with Boer horsemen. Signalling the Mashonaland Scouts to dismount and take their horses out of
sight, James got down on his belly and in detail studied his prize through his glasses. After three minutes’ search, he recognised General Jan Christian Smuts. He had lost Oosthuizen but found a far bigger prize, the man who had been President Kruger’s attorney-general in the Transvaal Republic. Even Gore-Bilham would forget Sebastian’s betrayal.

  Smiling to himself, he had begun to crawl backwards away from his line of view into the valley when down below everyone began to round up their horses and jump into their saddles. By his estimates, there were a thousand men down below.

  “They’re going to the rendezvous,” he said with satisfaction.

  Willie van Tonder was a man of forty, the elected commander of his troop of twenty Boers and the leading farmer in his small community at home. A flash of the reflected sun had drawn his dark brown eyes to the lip of the valley like iron filings to a magnet. A stolen pair of British binoculars had gone to his eyes and been focused quickly enough to see James order his scouts out of sight. There were seven people on the hill when he counted, six wearing wide-brimmed hats while the one giving the orders looked to Willie like an officer in one of the fancy British regiments. The man had a plumed feather on the side of his hat. Willie watched the officer drop on his belly and caught a second glint of the sun’s reflection from the lens of the glasses, the first having come from a polished button on the officer’s uniform.

  Quickly, and with fear gripping his stomach, he had walked across to General Smuts.

  “It’s a trap,” he said to the general. “A British officer has his binoculars on us right now. They’re waiting for us.”

  “Up-saddle and disperse!” came the immediate order.

  To James Brigandshaw’s astonishment, the men down below began to move out of the valley at the gallop in the opposite direction to the rendezvous, straight up the pass he had just followed. Thankful his horses had not been extended, he led the charge out of the pass away from the angry Boer commando, kicking up the dust down below.

  Christiaan de Wet was a phantom to the British. Every time they tried to draw the cord tight around the neck of his commando he slipped through the noose. Half an hour before the two regiments of Scots Cavalry would have made contact with his six hundred men, outnumbering them more than two to one, a Boer scout, using the skills he had learnt through his life hunting buck, cantered into de Wet’s camp.

  “It’s a trap. They’re making a sweep with mounted men. Somehow they know the rendezvous.”

  “Up-saddle! Up-saddle!”

  Within minutes de Wet’s men were remounted and galloping south.

  When James burst out of the pass that would barely take an ox-wagon he was confronted with a second Boer commando kicking dust so high only the front riders could be seen for what they were.

  “De Wet,” he said out loud before charging out onto the plain, veering away from the dust cloud to cut around the hills and back to the railway line. When his horse was almost blown he brought the animal down to a walk. When he looked back from the saddle, he watched Smuts and his commando veer south having cut through the pass. Quickly, the two dust clouds merged into one.

  To the northwest and twenty miles from Kroonstad, Tinus and his commando reached the rendezvous on the Vals River where a Boer homestead had been burnt to the ground by the British. Sebastian had spent the rest of the day trying to convince Tinus the rendezvous was now a British trap.

  Half an hour before the sun went down on the ridge that surrounded the abandoned farmhouse, horsemen began to appear on all sides.

  “Now do you believe me?” said Sebastian.

  “Up-saddle!”

  Leading his men in one concentrated thrust Tinus galloped at the cavalry on the ridge who had dismounted to take better aim. The British bullet that hit Sebastian knocked him straight out of the saddle of the spare Boer pony he was riding, the pain greater from the smack on the ground than the bullet that had smashed through his shoulder.

  Tinus broke through the line of kneeling soldiers with comparative ease… Shooting a galloping horseman was more luck than judgement. Having broken through, the Boers galloped in all directions to give the British as many ways to chase as there were Boer horsemen. Raising his rifle above his head he cheered. It would take a month to bring his commando together again but they were free of the British trap. Alone he brought the black stallion down to a canter from the full gallop and turned in the saddle to look back. The British were galloping all over the plain in pursuit of the Boers exactly as the Boers had intended. Coming towards him at a steady gallop was a small group of British cavalry. Tinus changed the direction of his horse, bringing the animal back to the gallop. When he looked back the tight group had also changed direction.

  The sun was down behind the hills and throwing red shards of light at the wakening heavens. The only thing the British captain missed in the hunt was the hounds, the baying of the hounds. Slowly and with arrogant confidence, as if he were riding down an exhausted fox, the man led his men as they overtook their quarry.

  “He knows he’s being hunted. By the time the sun sets tomorrow, Gore-Bilham will have made me a major. Corporal McIntosh! Go ahead and around the fugitive. Cut him off and shoot his horse if he doesn’t surrender.”

  Billy Clifford watched the man he would now call Martinus Jacobus McDonald Oosthuizen in his lead story. Major-General Gore-Bilham sat outside his tent in a low canvas chair he intended taking on his hunting safari when the war was over. Next to Gore-Bilham, Colonel Hickman was looking at the skeleton of a man the newspapers had called the Giant. Billy had taken the required photograph of the bent figure the captain had walked from the rendezvous on the Vals River. McIntosh had shot dead the black stallion Jeremiah Shanks had once named Diamond. The full beard was mostly grey and a bald patch showed on top of the man’s head, the once chestnut hair, lank down to his shoulders, the colour of pepper and salt.

  Tinus limped from the fall from his horse and his only satisfaction was most everyone else had broken through the cordon of British cavalry. If the general he had debagged, now sitting with his booted and gartered calves thrust out from where he sat in his chair, had feathers, he could not have looked more like a vulture first on the kill. The man next to him with the red nose and drooping moustache stood up.

  “General Oosthuizen. I am Colonel Hickman. The general you have met. It is my sad duty to inform you of the charge of treason you will face in Cape Town. You will have been perfectly aware that British subjects fighting against the Crown will be tried for treason and should they be found guilty, hanged by the neck until they are dead.”

  “I am a Boer soldier. A Boer. My ancestors came to this country more than two hundred years ago.”

  “Let the courts decide, sir.”

  “I am a prisoner of war.”

  “You are, sir, a traitor,” said Gore-Bilham from the comfort of his chair.

  “I barely recognised you with your trousers on,” said Tinus, smiling for the first time since his horse had been shot from under him.

  A British medical orderly had found Sebastian where he had fallen in the waist-high grass. The pain in his broken hip and shattered shoulder had reached the screaming stage where he wished to die. No other thought pumped through the agony of his brain. To Sebastian, the half-hour lying hidden in the grass had seemed an eternity.

  “Come here, cock. We got one,” the orderly had shouted to his companion, combing the scene of the battle for bodies. “Bloody Boer, by the look of ’im.”

  “I’m actually a bloody Englishman,” said Sebastian through his teeth.

  “Get a stretcher! The bugger’s alive and speaks English. Look, cock, no offence but if you’re an Englishman where’s your uniform? You’re dressed like a Boer even if you do talk highfalutin’ English. Now, where’s it hurt?”

  “Everywhere. The bullet hit my left shoulder, and I broke something falling off my horse. My brother is Lieutenant-Colonel James Brigandshaw, second in command of British Intelligence. I was trying to talk to
the Boer general.”

  “Well, you’d better shut up talkin’ now. Fact is, whoever you are, you’re a lucky sod. The bullet went clean through your shoulder and out to the other side. Mind you, ’nother hour and you’d ’ave bled to death… Chalky,” he said standing up in the grass, “bring the stretcher,” and then looking down at Seb, “What we do is plug the hole both ends and stop the blood oozing out… Come on, Chalky, the bugger’s passed out.”

  Part 7 - Revenge

  1

  July 1901

  Billy Clifford interrupted his piece on the concentration camps to follow the trial of the Boer rebel, General Oosthuizen. Not only had the British proved his domicile in the Cape but before that, the man had lived in British Rhodesia. Oosthuizen was a British subject who had deliberately, on his own volition, taken up arms against the British Crown, causing the deaths of over five hundred British subjects in the murderous guerrilla campaign that he had unleashed in the Transvaal, the Free State and the Cape. The British were adamant… The man was a murderous traitor who should be spared the privilege of a firing squad and hanged like a common criminal.

  All Billy’s efforts to interview the prisoner in Cape Town central prison were denied under the emergency laws generated by a war that was dragging on with no end in sight. His article The man’s a Boer was received with enthusiasm by readers in Dublin and quoted in English papers who were sick of the war and Kitchener’s British methods. Billy had to smile… There were always newspapers looking for political points. He even travelled out to the farm Kleinfontein in Franschhoek Valley in an attempt to interview the prisoner’s British wife.