The Great Karoo

by Fred Stenson

  But other kinds of stories floated around, ones contrary to the notion that the Boers were done. Rumour had it a big British convoy had been captured in the Orange Free State. The rumour said it was Christiaan De Wet, and that he had turned a mountain of their mail into ash. Another version added wagons full of winter clothing that the Boers were now wearing. What everyone did know for certain was that no mail or winter clothes had shown up here.

  Despite the rumours, Frank believed the war was close to over. Maybe it was the leisure that convinced him. He was allowed to sleep to the slothful hour of six. Breakfast at seven. Muster parade at nine. Wood and coal were plentiful, and so were commandeered metal tubs and fuel. Frank had boiled his uniform and skimmed off a rich cream of dead lice. When the water was just the right temperature between boiling and cool, he jumped in himself and had a scrub. For a couple of hours after that, while his uniform and smalls dried on a bush, he stretched out on his oil sheet, naked in the winter sunshine, and felt louse-free.

  Ovide was absorbed in watching the horses eat and coming up with new ways to soothe their feet and legs. That was his excuse for not cleaning up. There was also his fatalism. The lice would come back anyway, so what was the point of getting rid of them? Finally, Frank boiled the water and demanded Ovide’s clothes. Later on, when he and his clothes were washed and he was back in uniform, Ovide admitted to Frank that he felt better.

  Part of the reason the men felt so comfortable at Silverton was that their horses were clapped out. A great many had died between Kroonstad and Pretoria, and hardly a one of the living was what you’d call fit. The exceptions were Eddy’s monstrosity and Frank’s Dunny. Via the grapevine, Frank heard that Casey Callaghan’s buckskin, The General, was still doing well; and, though there was never a word about him or his horse, Frank felt confident that Jeff Davis’s blue mare would still be going strong.

  When Frank looked along the horse lines, nowadays, what he saw most of were knackered Argentines. Overworked, lame, ribs hanging out of them, covered in rubs and sores. They were a lazy horse to begin with but had become legitimately feeble. The opinion among the men was that the Mounted Rifles could go nowhere until a batch of remounts was found.

  On June n, the bugler blew the long reveille at 3 A.M. Hardly a man moved, thinking it was a mistake. Then the sergeants were among them, blowing whistles, shouting, poking at them with sticks. The message was to ride. Something about a battle.

  In less than an hour, Frank had Dunny saddled and was standing beside her in the dark. She was sick of this camp and keen to go. Ovide was on his way to complain to Lieutenant Davidson that neither the Basuto nor the Boer gelding were fit to carry him, but Sergeant Brindle intercepted him and told him it was a bad time to plead with the lieutenant. Fact was, both the Basuto and the Boer gelding had to go. Ovide must pick one and let the other be taken by another soldier. Everywhere, soldiers were complaining, and sergeants and officers were telling them to shut up and get moving. The orders were to take oat bags and man rations for two days, but otherwise nothing was said about their mission or destination.

  Travelling by moonlight, they started south. When they crossed the first ridge, an army appeared, flowing like a silver sludge below them. They absorbed into its near edge, with more of Hutton’s brigade.

  By dawn, they were six miles east, moving at the double. They crossed the Pienaars River. From behind a slant ridge that rose before them came a fearsome roar and the incoming whine of shells. An ammunition wagon flipped in a donga and all six mules were turned on their back, hoof irons churning. The Boer gunners aimed for the wagon, hoping to explode it inside the passing army.

  The order came to gallop. French’s cavalry raced to the fore, aimed at the ridge’s heart. The Mounted Rifles were headed for the hill’s north flank. They left their horses and climbed. The order was for an extended firing line on top, well spaced.

  On his way up through the brush and stones, Frank saw Ovide on his right and Pete on his left. He waved at them, as if they were surprise acquaintances in a hockey crowd. The Boer barrage was louder than ever but nothing was hitting the slope around them. It meant the shells and bullets were going overhead. It meant that, when they got to the top, they would be in the thick of it.

  At the crest, Frank did not wait for evidence. He threw himself flat. It did not take long for bullets to rip the grass around him. He crawled like a mad thing, worming forward, clawing with his elbows. He was looking for a nice stout stone, and there were none. All he could find was a scatter of smaller rocks that he pulled in and piled as fast as his hands could move. In the din, he could make out the mechanical chug of a pom-pom—Pete’s fucking piano, walking the keys toward them.

  When his little wall was built and there were no more stones, Frank peeked through a gap and saw the bigger ridge the Mounted Rifles were facing. There was a vale between and a screen of trees. Besides higher, the Boer ridge was rockier and thickly matted with gorse and thorn. The Boers had chosen the ground and it was to their advantage. Their guns were invisible in the hill folds. Their snipers were somewhere in that brush and rock, impossible to see.

  Because the barrage never stopped, time became indecipherable, immeasurable. It held Franks attention like some everlasting song, and all he could do was fire back into the hill’s bland face and dream of doing damage.

  He decided four hours had gone by when the officers started bringing up reserves and piling them on the left. They were going for their tried-and-true method of extending the British flank until it went around the Boer flank. But Frank heard and felt an alteration and addition to the clamour attacking them. On the Boer side, a fresh gun and maybe another pom-pom had cut loose, aimed at that stretch of hill where the reserves were forming and scratching their holes. Frank saw shells explode among them. He saw the reserves abandon their position and peel back. There would be no turning of the Boer flank today.

  As the afternoon moved along, the ironic heat of the winter sun drilled into Frank’s back. When it looked like there would never be anything to do but stay put and hope not to die, an opportunity presented itself. Into a grassy interval on the opposite hillside, a Boer gun team came racing. A pom-pom on its limber bounced behind the horse. Some sharpie in the Canadian battery laid a shell right in the gun horse’s face. Frank had just put ten in his magazine and he donated them to the cause of driving the Boer gunners back. Fifty others must have done the same. The gun horse was shot several times, and its team had barely unhooked the corpse from the pom-pom when they had to run for their lives. The gun was stranded, and all the Mounted Rifles had to do to keep it like that was fire at anyone who dared approach.

  For twenty minutes, this was successful and fulfilling sport. Frank imagined the officer congratulating them: Let’s be honest, it was not our day, but through your quick thinking, good shooting, and pluck…

  Then the pom-pom moved backwards. As if it had come to life, the gun and limber lurched up the rise and disappeared over its rim.

  A while later, Fred Morden came to tell Frank that it was his group’s turn to go for rations. The rally point was directly below, and Ovide and Pete got there first. The talk below was of the miraculous pom-pom, and the cook dispensing meat paste said the majority opinion was that the gun’s limber must have had a rope on its tail. When the gun was stranded, some Boer must have crawled forward and tied more rope to that rope, until they could pull it in from cover. Everybody hated it when the Boers were clever.

  Back in the firing line, the descending sun spilled light that jewelled the cratered ridge ahead. If the Rifles were going to move, now was the time, when the light was square in the Boers’ eyes. No such order came. After the flank-turning gambit had failed, the brass were out of ideas.

  The Rifles stayed put and the sun vanished; the air began to fill with darkness and cold. An icy wind was blowing in their faces. It was Klip River and Crocodile Pass all over again. Another cold night without blankets.

  Fred Morden and Tom Miles came
with a bucket of water for their bottles and to tell them to stay in their holes. If they wanted out of the wind, they should dig themselves deeper. No visiting. No fires.

  The barrage of guns had left a din between Frank’s ears. The flickering pictures that filled his mind were out of kilter. The people and animals did everything too fast, a madcap pace that Frank did not want to look at. Finally, above his head’s roar, he shouted a string of questions.

  Why had General Roberts extended his velvet glove to the Boers again? Letting the Joburg ones leave, probably with their gold and guns? Maybe the field guns he so generously let them keep were the ones trying to plaster Frank all of today? The ones he had to hide from by keeping his face jammed in the dirt.

  And where were all those wizards who sat naked in their bathtubs at Silverton, patiently explaining why the war was over? The Boers were so clearly broken, so pathetically demoralized they would never rouse themselves to fight again.

  All this did not seem so clear or certain tonight, and Frank cursed himself for a gull that he had drunk it up and even spouted it back. Amazing what you could tell yourself when you wanted it to be true.

  In that cold and angry moment, a fellow wanted to do something to show how sick he was of Empire bombast and flummery; something the high-up types like Curly Hutton could see and know was protest. And, just as Frank was thinking it, he saw a little plume of wavering light far to his right. A soldier, thinking like Frank, had scratched together a pile of grass and struck a match to it.

  Whistles blew and men yelled at the maker of the fire to put it out. Instead, another fire popped up in another place.

  Frank looked around himself. Ovide’s spot stayed dark but a flame bloomed where Pete Belton was. For a few seconds, Frank could see Pete’s lunatic face aglow. From lower on the hill, Sergeant Brindle’s whistle shrilled.

  “Douse that fire, damn you!”

  From the Boers’ place above, it must have looked like a religious event: the Mounted Rifles’ firing line suddenly mapped out in tiny dots of light. The Boer pom-pom leapt back to life, thudding the frozen walls of night. Frank saw Pete knocking out his fire with his rifle butt. Men were calling him names. He was cussing them back.

  But the pom-pom was coming, and it seemed to Frank it was coming straight for him. He crushed his face against the freezing ground, clasped his hands on the back of his head, and pushed so he breathed frosty muck and smothered. He felt the blast through the ground and through himself. The one-pound shell blew his rock wall on top of him.

  Frank yelled at Ovide until he replied. He yelled at Pete and Pete cussed. Frank sucked the blood off his knuckles and rocked like a child.

  When the first gloomy light found him, Frank saw whiskers of frost on his shoulders and arms; down his legs. When he tried to shake it off, none of his joints worked. He had to fight himself to break their locks. Then the crystals shattered and flew.

  When the first ray of sunlight sprayed from their ridge, the Boers resumed their barrage. The British reply was a fraction as loud. To Frank, the difference was a dialogue.

  The British were saying, We are conserving ammunition. We are running out.

  The Boers were replying, We’ve got plenty and we’re coming for you.

  Just past noon, the Boers made their push, their attempt to win the thing outright. Their firing had seemed heavy all day but was suddenly redoubled. They must have rearranged their guns and positions, for the pattern of everything was suddenly not as it had been. Their firing was dangerously aslant and unpredictable.

  It was then that Private Walter Frost was killed. Whether he stood up out of cover to go for water or meat paste, or just to flex away some stiffness, or had not moved at all, he was shot and the Mauser bullet that hit him killed him. English-born cowboy. Isle of Wight. Ruddy-faced, stocky, average height. Just shy of thirty-four. A bachelor who enlisted at Calgary, same day Frank had. The first Canadian Mounted Rifle killed in battle. The dam of luck had broken.

  Soon after Frost was killed, Major Macdonnell was helping some men build a rock wall. Those around him heard a pistol bark. They knew it was close and expected to see some crazy Boer standing there. But it was just themselves, and Macdonnell down, crouched over a wound in his guts. They saw his holster empty, his Colt pistol on the ground. When he had bent for a rock, the pistol had fallen; had fired when it hit. The .45 calibre bullet entered at an angle such that it went a long way and was still in Macdonnell. They laid him out and waved for the Red Cross.

  In the middle of the following night, relief finally came. Reserves had been scraped together, and they found the Mounted Rifles in their holes and replaced them. When Pete, Ovide, and Frank reached Eddy and the horses, a story was making the rounds that something had given in the Boer line, something near its centre.

  At dawn, when the British started probing that centre, there was no response. During the night, the middle of the Boer line had retreated; no one knew why. When the middle fell away, the beefed-up flanks were in danger of being turned from within and had to follow. Now, Roberts’ army was sweeping into that cavity. The three-day battle of Diamond Hill was over. A victory.

  Frank Adams would remember four things about Diamond Hill. First was the appearance of the little wall he spent the daylight hours contemplating. It was like a shrine in which Our Lady might decide to appear. Second, he remembered Pete Belton’s face glowing above his trash fire, and how that brought on the pompom. Third was the soldier who had borrowed the Boer gelding for the fight coming to say that the horse had been blown up when the Boers made their push.

  Last of all, he remembered Greasy Griesbach sucking the sole of his dirty foot. At their bivouac the night after the Boer retreat, Greasy had been kicking down an outhouse for firewood and ran a nail through his foot. He yanked his boot and sock off, and his trousers too, so he could flex his leg enough to get the foot in his mouth. He sucked the injured part pink and was ready to ride again the next day.

  Part Four

  KATBOSCH

  Aldershot, June 1900

  General Butler sat on a bench bolted to the wall in the court-martial shed. A window streaked from yesterday’s rain looked out on a rare beautiful day. If you brought a man from the moon today, and sent him home tomorrow, he would say Aldershot was paradise.

  Butler wanted no part of it. He preferred to be alone in the dark, in a place where many had paid a high price for their indiscretions and outright crimes. Not in this shed but in others like it, Butler had presided over such proceedings; had meted out jailings, floggings, years at hard labour—stripped a great many soldiers of rank. A wonder no one had dragged him into an alley and beaten him to death.

  What he had never done at a court marital was pronounce a sentence of death. He had always found a way around it, some gap in the evidence, some mitigating circumstance. The day he’d stepped off the ship in Cape Town to be proxy colony governor was the closest he ever came. All they’d wanted was his signature on the document to execute a man already found guilty and sentenced. He no longer remembered how he’d ducked it, but he had.

  It was all about squaring things with his exacting Catholic God. On the final day, he would much rather stand behind his military record than his personal one. For how could Butler even begin to explain to the Almighty his inability to make his one true wife happy? How to justify his failures to control his temper in the face of her antics?

  It was Elizabeth, queen of his private existence, who had sent him to the court-martial shed today, looking for ghosts of suffering to moan with, but also looking for memories of happier times. In the early 1890s, when he’d been in charge of infantry at Aldershot, this shed had fallen into disuse and Elizabeth had claimed it for a studio. With horses grazing and charging about, her models were everywhere.

  Her favourite thing, even then when their children were quite young, was to stand in front of a cavalry charge—see how long she could stay put with the horses thundering toward her. Butler would watch, lead-faced,
determined not to show concern, but she would wait so long before bolting, he could never quite control the flutter in his guts. He barely stifled the urge to run to her. It was supposedly done for her art, to see from the enemy’s perspective what it was like to face a British cavalry charge, but she also did it to show off and for the exhilaration. Afterwards, she would prance about and toss her head, somewhat like a horse in a moment of pride.

  Butler remembered having made love to her here on just such a day—or she to him—right in this very room! Long after it had become an infrequent occurrence at home, she had taken the notion and seduced him. He had muttered about the disastrous consequences should someone walk in, but was of course pleased.

  Where was any of this today? Their children liked to point out that Butler was a tyrant who would not let anyone speak on the suspicion they might disagree with him. The cruellest cut, from one of his daughters, was that he had more or less destroyed his military career by favouring the underdog, but seemed to lack any such sympathetic feelings toward his family.

  Not true. If he knew what was troubling them, then he was concerned. But having had to volunteer for foreign wars in hopes of getting a reward or a promotion—in order to make his family’s expensive living!—he had seldom been present during their younger years. One gets out of touch, and eventually incapable of playing with the silly young creatures. On their side, they began to treat him like an ancient grandfather or a temple statue, someone or something to be compulsorily venerated rather than loved. From there to active dislike was a short step.