by Fred Stenson
After the lieutenants left, the sergeants took over. Franks sergeant, Harry Brindle, an English Mountie from Macleod, let them have it. All they were known for was stealing and insubordination, he said. They probably thought that was funny, but nothing like it would be tolerated beyond this day. At the front, they would be expected to act like real soldiers.
Brindle came at them from a new angle. Though they seemed not to understand it, the Mounted Rifles were a battalion of scouts and could expect to be thrust to the front, and to the front of the front. They would be advance guards. They would guard artillery and draw fire so the artillery could spot enemy guns. Each man had better prepare his mind for that.
When Harry finally left them alone, Frank was smarting. It was true he had not thought much about being a fighting soldier, but it hardly seemed fair to let them rustle food for the camp and then give them hell for it. He was mad at Andy Skinner for bringing it on, though he suspected the lieutenants and sergeants had been waiting for an opportunity to make this speech.
Then along came Ovide, who had missed it all, grinning for the first time in weeks. An ugly horse trailed behind him. The mare looked almost green in this light, as if it had started out chestnut and gone mouldy. It was gaunt and poor in the hip. Frank kept this to himself because Ovide was delighted.
Since his arrival at Fischer’s Farm, Ovide had been walking the herds of rehabilitating horses. He had found this one in an equine junk pile: horses that had been weeded out and would either be given to the black camp workers or killed. Ovide discussed the horse with the black wrangler who had taken the junk horses to graze. The man told Ovide the horse was a Basuto, named for a kind of African people who lived in the mountains east of here. They had developed this breed for the mountains, and, though not much to look at, Basutos were very hardy. The man himself had his eye on the horse, so Ovide paid him an English pound to forget about it.
Ovide gave Frank a tour of the animal, showing him the angle of the fetlock and the way the knee was set and said something about the barrel and the stifle. She still seemed like an ugly horse to Frank, but he made a fuss over her anyway, as it was good to see Ovide happy.
Then Frank left Ovide to brushing and pampering his find, and returned to brooding about whether he was a bad soldier. He certainly had not put much thought into being a good one, nor had the episode in the Karoo impressed him with army life. The more he considered the so-called Carnarvon Expedition, the more it came out as a mangle they had been turned through, for no good reason. Horses brought from Canada, like Ovide’s cutting mare, had been sacrificed for nothing. The speeches tonight rankled too. Their response to the Karoo had been to find ways to stay alive in it. On the Bloemfontein road, they had found ways to eat. But here was the army saying, that’s not right. They must stop using the principles of home to survive in Africa. From now on, the only sense they were allowed to make was army sense.
Brandfort
Frank was in the habit of reading whatever newspapers he found. No camp was virginal and newspapers were a staple of the trash: either papers from Cape Town or older ones that had come from Britain or the colonies, sometimes wrapped around cakes and puddings. On a good day, the news might roll right up to Frank as he lay on his bedroll: a tumbleweed of words. On the march, he would sometimes find pages stabbed on thorn bushes, rattling their whereabouts.
The habit came from home, where his father was a tireless reader and where his mother, who had taught Frank to read, could not stand for him to be in the same room as a newspaper and not read it. If he did not, she assumed he could not.
Africa was different. No one here cared whether Frank read, but he did so to get above the ant’s eye view of the soldier. It was a way of finding out what was going on and what people back home might be hearing.
One thing he learned was that the folks back home weren’t reading about him. Mentions of Canadians in the newspapers were rare. Now that the Mounted Rifles were in Hutton’s brigade attached to General Roberts’ column, Frank hoped that might change. At least, he expected the news to be about things he had seen or been part of.
What he hadn’t seen yet but wanted to was General Roberts’ war balloon. At the front, soldiers floated up in it and spied on Boer troop positions and gun emplacements. Frank had read about the balloon in a newspaper and had kept a page with a drawing. The reporter on the piece was Winston Churchill, who had written that the balloon was like the biblical pillar of cloud that guided the Jews to the promised land.
Another day, in a Cape Town newspaper, Frank read that Boer President Paul Kruger believed the British typhoid epidemic was the same as the plagues God sent against the Egyptians for keeping the Jews as slaves.
Both were references to the Bible story of how the Jews escaped Pharaoh, and Frank found it funny that both sides would use the same story to prove that God was with them. It seemed more likely that God liked neither side and might wipe out both before they did more damage.
When they left Fischer’s Farm, it was three in the morning, black-dark and very cold. By the time dawn broke the horizon, they were beyond the hills and into another blond expanse. As the lieutenants had predicted, the Mounted Rifles were an advance guard, shepherding a battery of guns.
Except for an occasional tree or bush, there was no place for the Boers to hide, and Frank found he almost pitied them. They might as well send Lord Roberts notes. See you on yonder hill. Or, When you get to the next river, we plan to give you hell.
The uneventful day of marching ended beside the railway tracks, where they joined Hutton’s brigade. The little creek of them absorbed into the great river of soldiers.
Hutton had noticed one thing about the Mounted Rifles so far: their lack of leadership. Herchmer was still in sick bay, and though Gilbert Sanders was healthy, he was on a ship, taking Boer prisoners to St. Helena. Hutton’s solution involved the Royal Canadian Dragoons, the other horse battalion that was drawn mostly from eastern Canada. Before they’d left Fischer’s Farm, Hutton gave them Colonel T.B. Evans, the Dragoons second-in-command, as their temporary commander.
Mounties like Harry Brindle and Hugh Davidson grumbled. The whole idea of the Mounted Rifles was that the battalion be led by Mounted Police officers, they said, and so it should be now. Frank found he held the opposite view. If he was going to be led into battle, better it be by a soldier than by a policeman.
Colonel Evans’ first act as their leader was unusual. He got them together and told them what was going on. There were three columns in this advance, he said. General Roberts’ column was in the middle between Ian Hamilton’s and John French’s. The three together made a front too wide for the Boers to skirt. Johnny Boer was a scrappy fighter, the colonel said, smart and by no means defeated. But Paardeburg had taken a bite out of him. At the moment he was weakened and in retreat, and the British side aimed to take full advantage.
A Rifles private put up his hand and was recognized. “Where are we?” he asked.
Colonel Evans laughed. “You’re at Karee Siding, private, in what the rebels call the Orange Free State.”
That day, their wagon convoy and their tents did not find them. It was the coldest night Frank had experienced in Africa, with a bitter wind combing the pan they were camped on. Frank and Ovide spread their oil sheet under them, and each man wore his greatcoat and wrapped himself in his blanket. They slept cold anyway.
Next day, as they were marching, they did see the war balloon, hanging above the churned dust. The basket was trimmed with officers, their field glasses sparking. Frank thought it looked like an onion, with a striped skin and its root teat pointed down.
He jabbed Ovide, then reached in his shirt for the newspaper picture he had saved. Ovide looked back and forth from the picture to the real balloon. Frank had intended to keep the page but gave it to Ovide now. Smith folded it carefully and put it in his shirt pocket.
That evening they stopped a few miles short of Brandfort. They were told that, come morning, they would
be involved in a fight to take the town and its associated kopjes. Again, they had no tents, but the general jumpiness of the camp was distraction from the cold. Frank woke up many times and saw by moonlight that men were up, either standing in their greatcoats or doing some exercise to excite warmth. Despite the general shortage of sleep, the atmosphere at their breakfast in the dark was almost giddy, as if their attack was a practical joke.
When they got on the trail, they were aimed west of Brandfort toward a couple of kopjes it would be their job to clear. Those hills were just beginning to sprout detail when the pounding of guns began. At first it was just noise but then a divide was crossed, and the first Boer shell exploded above them. Hot shrapnel shards rained down.
Beside Frank and Ovide, a heavier shell hit the ground and exploded. A wave of orange dirt came flying. Frank’s eyes clamped before he asked them to. His mouth had less sense and was full of filth.
Some of the horses reared or ran, but Dunny and the Basuto held, even as dirt and stones hit them. A rabbit, frightened out of a prickly pear, ran toward them across the ruptured ground. It saw the wave of horses and zagged away. Some other fearful sight changed its mind again and it went pole-bending through the horses’ legs.
They heard a repeating whine above them, like someone strumming a tight wire. Those were the rifle bullets, Mauser bullets, and the air was full of them.
In some bushes along a kopje’s rise, the sergeants screamed for them to dismount and give their horses to the number threes. Frank and Ovide threw their reins to Gil Snaddon. They ran up the kopje’s flank. Near the top they could make out the crack of Mausers and the high-wire sound of bullets. The Boer artillery was pounding again, trying to find their range.
At the hill’s brow, a wide swale opened to the kopje’s next rise. Everybody threw themselves flat while deciding what to do. A barbwire fence ran away from them at an angle and was held in place by coffin-size stones. Greasy Griesbach was the first to run and throw himself behind one. Then there was a stampede for the rest of the rocks.
Frank and Ovide got balled up. They started running but went in different directions, then tried to come back and collided. By then, the stones were all taken and second choice was an anthill. They squeezed behind one that was four feet high and three wide: blood red and hard as a helmet.
After they had been there awhile, Frank figured out he was the only one shooting. With shells exploding and bullets whizzing and whining—some hitting their anthill with a pock or singing off—Ovide had set his rifle aside and was looking at the hill in an attitude of study. Frank told him to get shooting. If an officer saw him doing nothing, he’d think him a coward. Ovide banged off a few rounds then stopped again.
He wriggled around so his feet were facing the anthill and started kicking.
“Christ sake, Ovide! That’s our cover!”
Ovide kept on until a piece came off, a round of hard shell. He climbed back and put his face close to the wound, watching the ants mill about in the visible innards.
“They’re green,” he said.
“Damn it, Ovide, I don’t give a shit if they’re green. Now we’ll get ants on us.”
“Nope. They’re not leaving.”
Frank was yelling and cursing for Ovide to shoot when he heard the firing slacken, starting to his right. The Mounted Rifles on that side held back too. They swung their heads like birds on a wire, and halfway between them and where the Boers were, they saw a line of black civilians come running. Their older men were first, whipping at hollow-sided oxen. Behind the bullocks bounced humpy carts, piled with roped-down goods. Women wrapped in blankets came next, followed by children in file. Many of the women ran with baskets on their heads. They waved bits of cloth with their free hands. It was a whole African village, caught between the firing lines, trying to escape.
Close to Frank and Ovide, the villagers found a hole in the line and passed through. After they had gone, there was silence. Then, from somewhere far away, rifles started up. An artillery piece let fly and an enemy gun answered. The battle returned to its earlier tempo.
About two hours later, there was another tapering off. At first, it was just the Boers who stopped, but eventually the British did too. The Canadian sergeants started blowing their whistles, sounding the order “Stand to Your Horses.” Frank and Ovide ran back and mounted. Then came the command to charge. They were soon up the rise and looking over the crest. Their officers halted them, as the Boers were already too far gone to chase. The enemy’s trenches and piles of spent casings were all around them.
When it was over, Frank was amazed at how little he knew about his first battle. He could not honestly say he had seen one enemy. As they were eating tinned meat and drinking tea, Lieutenant Davidson came back from somewhere bursting with importance. As if it were self-evident, he said the strategy of the battle had been to keep adding men to the left until the British line was longer than the Boer right. This threatened the Boers with encirclement. When they saw it coming, they packed up and left.
Gossip added a little more. Apparently, things had not gone flawlessly. During the fight, a British staff officer came to tell Colonel Lessard (commander of the Royal Canadian Dragoons) to change position. A couple of soldiers who were close enough to hear thought they’d get a head start. They jumped up and ran for their horses, but had forgotten to uncock their rifles and one went off, the bullet passing between the British officer and Lessard. The Brit told Lessard he should take his stupid undertrained Canadians home.
A Dragoon private and a Mounted Rifle sergeant had been wounded in the battle, and a number of horses were hit and had to be killed. Frank heard, too, that a Dragoon private had died back at Karee Siding. Rather than face battle, he had shot himself.
Vet River, May 1900
Roused before dawn, they were hustled across the prairie in the inky dark. Come the grey light, they saw a meander of bush and trees that was the shallow valley of the Vet River. A mile closer and they could see brown lakes where the stream had overspilled.
As at Brandfort, the air began to fill with the various weights and sizes of Boer shells, lobbed invisibly from the distant kopjes. From much closer, Mauser bullets were sizzling.
For a time it was dangerous. They were pinned down and lacked cover. The Mauser fire came from the bushy green of the river’s far bank. Then most of the Mounted Rifles were ordered back to their horses and out of range. They were being held in reserve, like benched hockey players, while the Dragoons moved into the battle’s maw.
In their saddles, the biggest risk Frank and Ovide faced was sunstroke. While the guns shook the air from both sides and tore up distant tufts, the two of them scanned the horizons, looking for sheep and goats: something to fry up in their little pans, their dixies, come battle’s end.
For Frank, the battle was another invisible thing acted out behind a curtain of coloured smoke, more noise and stink than anything visible. Though Lieutenant Davidson was looking through field glasses, he probably could not see more; but having heard the battle plan, he could at least imagine it. That was what he narrated to the men. The British were adding to their left again. Soon, the Boer flank would be turned and the enemy would have to scamper.
After a couple of hours, the noise slackened, and an order came for all remaining troops to charge. The Mounted Rifles rode across the river at Pretorius Drift. When they came out on the far side, they were apparently victorious.
In the triumphant camp that night, quite a few of the heroes were Canadian Dragoons. Two Dragoon lieutenants, Turner and Borden, both politicians’ sons, had waded across the Vet River twice to fight. First time, they and their followers had shot it out with some Boers behind a stone wall. Outnumbered, the Canadians were forced back. But their lieutenants led them across again, in a place where the water was up to their faces and they had to hold their rifles over their heads.
When the Mounted Rifles had charged and crossed the drift, that was the courageous lead they had been following.
A Boer gun was seized. A surprising number of Boer dead were found in the reeds and bush along the far shore. The officers said Turner and Borden were sure to be mentioned in dispatches. They might even get medals.
While this celebration went on, Frank and Ovide sat apart. Finally, they snuck off to where they would sleep. Even Ovide found Frank quiet and said so. Frank did not try to explain his thoughts, for they sounded disloyal even to him.
If it was all so damn simple, he was thinking, if the Boers were always going to be outnumbered and would always have to run when the British left extended beyond their right, then why not resign? Like you would in a hopeless game of chess.
It wasn’t as if the war could not be interrupted. Back at Brandfort, the villagers had poured between their lines and the battle had stopped for them. If the war could stop then, it could stop at any time. So why, given the mismatch, did it not stop permanently?
Frank had heard various reasons: reasons of Empire, diamonds and gold; Winston Churchill and Rudyard Kipling reasons; Cecil Rhodes reasons; Paul Kruger reasons. But all Frank could imagine was his own leg blown off, or his good cayuse mare turned into one of those raddled corpses covered in vultures.
To try to slow himself down, Frank said what old cowboys were inclined to when a younger man was running off at the mouth. So you got it all figured out, eh, sonny?
