The Great Karoo

by Fred Stenson

  “Give the bastards no quarter,” he said. “Never have, never will.”

  After a day’s rest, Rimington was ready to move. He gathered the new units and gave them a talk. This was a very important part of the war, he said. The Boers could collapse at any moment. A week ago, Broadwood had recaptured the town of Reitz. His men had found a letter from a Boer general to the local commandant telling him to step out of the way as the British came. When the Brits had run up their flag and moved on, the Boers should return. The British didn’t garrison, just kept plunging forward, so the safest place to be was the most recently conquered town.

  Broadwood did what the letter suggested he would. He raised the Union Jack and left Reitz. But, in the middle of the night, he came back with four hundred men.

  The place was full of snoozing rebels and Broadwood made a fabulous grab. The only frustration was that the big fish got away. President Steyn himself was there. He was awakened by his Native cook and escaped in his nightcap. He left £11,500 in cash behind.

  This was how Colonel Rimington wanted his column to think as they set out to march. Stay alert, for at any moment you could run into a Boer president or find yourself in a scrap with Christiaan De Wet himself.

  Lindley/Kroonstad, July 1901

  The Scouts were a different bunch now. When many had left at the end of June, Charlie Ross had filled the spaces with Tommys and all kinds of colonials. To Frank’s mind, most of the new ones were not scouts at all.

  Now that Frank himself was a scout, he tried to act it. Charlie Ross had not asked him to take the oath, but Frank found a guinea fowl feather and stuck it in his hat brim. When he’d been Jeff’s horse-holder, he had insisted on not shooting Boers, though he robbed them of liquor. Now, he insisted he would shoot them, if there was opportunity and cause. He was anxious to illustrate, but as Rimington’s column rode away from Heilbron, there were no Boer rebels on whom to display his resolve.

  When Rimington had given his speech at Heilbron, Frank had been sitting on the charcoal gelding beside Jeff and The Blue. He had noticed that Jeff paid no attention; even had his eyes closed. During July and into August, as the column marched around a Kroonstad-Lindley-Heilbron triangle, Jeff slept as much as he could and drank amply whenever he had the means. Frank knew what Jeff usually did when he was scouting, and he was not doing it. Frank found it funny that his debut of scouting with Jeff felt more like soldiering with Ovide.

  But as the weeks piled up, all to no effect, Frank got Jeff’s point. Why use up your horses and your scouting craft looking for Boers who weren’t there? As for booty, the few head of livestock they picked up could not be called plunder in any but a tribal herdsman’s sense.

  On a bitterly cold August day, when Frank and Jeff were riding well ahead, they stopped in a field of anthills to have tea. Frank bashed the lid off a hill, while Jeff dumped his water bottle contents (actual water today) into his blackened kettle. Frank struck a match and lit the hill’s writhing innards. Jeff threw tea leaves in the kettle and set it in the fire to boil.

  As Frank walked around in his greatcoat, thumping himself with his arms, Jeff warmed his bare hands on the ant fire. Frank had been trying to figure out their situation, but had never quite been able to. Now, he gave up and asked.

  “Where the hell are the Boers, anyway?”

  Jeff kept one hand in the fire’s heat and swished the other across the pale landscape.

  “Boers don’t travel in winter. No grass. They’ll fight when it’s spring.”

  “But why do we keep travelling?”

  “Lord Kitchener thinks we’re driving them. He thinks we’ll wear them out.”

  Though Frank rode the old gelding most of the time, and had a nifty Boer gelding as his third horse, he still had no way of giving Dunny a rest. He could not leave her anywhere, because he never knew where they were going and when they’d be back. What made it worse was that Rimington liked his column to move fast, as if to do otherwise was disrespect to Lord Kitchener.

  If Frank was angry at this waste of energy and horseflesh, Charlie Ross was beside himself. After all his time in Africa, after all his avowed and disavowed dealings, Charlie felt he knew damn well where the Boers were and where their loot was apt to be. Trotting around this triangle of northwest towns was not it.

  If Charlie’s boil was high, and he was certain only Scouts could hear him, he would say that, as this war waned, they would all need to be on the lookout for blame. The British newspapers were having a field day depicting the rough tactics used against the Boers. The British army’s image needed sprucing up, and it needed it quickly before the war ended. If the British could convince their own people that their regular army had been fair and sound to the last, and that all of the worst excesses had been the actions of undisciplined colonials, weren’t they apt to try it? Charlie had a honed way of concluding this caution: “They’re cleaning up the mess, boys, and they’re tearing us up for rags.”

  Each time Frank heard this, he looked at Jeff. It was his way of pointing out that he knew Charlie’s concern was mainly for himself, and why. Charlie was the one with the price on his head for shooting Boer prisoners wearing khaki. The wilder versions of that story—never refuted by Charlie—said he made them dig their own graves.

  In early August, something happened that was so perfect a nettle to Charlie’s sensitivities that it was hard to believe it wasn’t a planned joke. Rimington sent Capt. Hugh Trenchard to the Scouts to instill in them British discipline and procedure. A couple of days into this situation, Major Ross was having an afternoon snooze when he woke to the sound of cavalry drill.

  “Form fours!”

  “Flank of fours, right wheel!”

  Charlie came out of his tent as if stung by bees. He ran at Trenchard and looked as if he might jump at the captain in his saddle.

  “Say, you! Cut that out! These are Scouts! They’re not goddamn tin soldiers!”

  On August 7, Lord Kitchener sent a proclamation to all Boer generals and to the presidents of Transvaal and the Orange Free State. It said that any Boer rebel still in the field on September 15 would be banished from South Africa for life.

  In the Scouts’ camps, the proclamation spawned argument. Some said it would lead to mass surrender and end the war. Others said it would stiffen Boer resolve and prolong the conflict. Frank wasn’t sure which he thought, and Jeff was too aloof and languorous to join the discussion.

  A week later, the Boers suddenly appeared. First, the Scouts blundered into a Boer convoy near Lindley, in a place they had marched several times before. Two days later, they chased two hundred Boers for eight miles, losing them across the Liebenbergsvlei. Then a tiger spring landed on a laager near Reitz, yielding them prisoners and loaded carts. Before September ended, Rimington’s column hit two more commandos on the move.

  In the midst of the furious action, Frank asked Jeff for an explanation. It was still winter. Frank had never seen native grass so peeled and poor. So why, according to Jeff’s theory, were the Boers suddenly active?

  “They’re moving supplies,” Jeff said patiently, as if to a child. “It proves they mean to fight when the rains come.”

  Now that Rimington’s column had reason to march, it marched faster and farther, and there was never a chance to rest Dunny. Jeff’s suggestion was that Frank start a little string of horses for himself. Rimington’s growing loot included horses, and Jeff had acquired several. He paid the horse campies to give them special care. When Jeff talked like this, he sounded like Charlie Ross. In it was the assumption that Frank must look past Dunny to his next horse, but he was unwilling to do that.

  On one of the last days of August, Rimington caught another convoy. This one was the jackpot. Two thousand cattle. Sixty-one loaded wagons. It took a whole day to look through, deciding what was booty and what was dross. Frank found an unopened case of British navy rum that the Boers must have stolen. He tossed it under a bush and buried it with rejected goods.

  When they
were done, Rimington admitted it was time to get his convoy of plunder to the railway line. Kroonstad was the closest station. Rimington loved only to raid and regarded moving booty as a boring chore.

  At their first camp on the Kroonstad road, Jeff and Frank volunteered for night patrol. They left after dark and rode straight east. A Boer commando had got there before them and was laagered up for the night next to the debouched wagon train. Frank left his Boer pony with Jeff and crawled to the rum’s hiding place. Quietly, he unearthed it, then returned at a crawl. He moved the rum one arm’s length at a time, shinnying forward, lifting, and shinnying again.

  Instead of an accusation of looting, the two returned to praise. Rimington said the laager they had found was valuable proof that the Boers meant to attack them. The Boers were not going to surrender all these goods without a fight.

  Over the next two days, Rimington’s rearguard battled Boers buzzing in at a gallop from several angles. Frank and Jeff were in the thick of it, as the convoy crawled toward the railway town. Frank was watching a field gun fire when a tall, thin gunner slumped onto the barrel. The gun had been firing all afternoon and had to be sizzling hot. He ran to the soldier and the body came off the gun limp and bloody. It fell from Frank’s grasp and hit the ground like a sack of grain.

  When they buried him that evening, Frank learned the gunner’s name. James Black, from St. Catharines.

  They were camped on the edge of Kroonstad and no fires were allowed. Frank and Jeff had a rum bottle each, and though Frank was already very drunk, he kept on sipping because the death of Sergeant Black had caused him a relapse. All through this month of being a scout, Frank had managed the pain over Alma like a pile of plates on a stick. If he concentrated, never slacked, the pain could be held up there away from him. Today had jostled him hard and the plates had crashed.

  After Black had been killed, Frank wanted the comfort of Dunny. He wanted to ride his old friend to town. His weight made her limp from the start, but thinking how an out-of-whack ankle or knee can be walked right, he did not swap horses but kept on. The mare stepped in the mouth of an animal hole and let out a cry. Frank had never heard a sound like it come from her. He leapt off, rubbed her, spoke soothingly. But, even with no weight on her back, she limped the rest of the way.

  What had come to Frank, through these two dark heralds, was the idea that he might go home with nothing. Back on the Pongola, while wading in soup to his neck and taking reprieves with Jeff in the Swazi hills, he had achieved a faith almost religious that he could bring his woman, his horse, and his friend back. All of them, safely home to Alberta.

  These ideas did not chip or fray. They were blasting apart. First, there was Alma, pregnant by the Tommy guard, wishing Frank dead. Now Dunny, with a banshee yell, had announced that Frank would be leaving Africa without her.

  Today, when Frank could not hold the dead weight of Sergeant Black, and the man slid to the ground on the grease of his own blood, it told Frank that he could not save Jeff Davis either. Jeff would live or die, but not through Franks actions, or even Jeff’s own skill or luck. It would be through Jeff’s will—which Frank sensed was wavering.

  On his return from Barberton, Frank’s consolation was the idea that he and Jeff were twinned. Both had lost their women and their dreams. They would always be, in some way of the spirit, like a man with an empty sleeve, but Frank had grabbed onto the idea that they could combine their small remaining hope and limp home together.

  But tonight, on the black night of Black’s death, with black rum coursing in him, Frank saw the thing as Jeff probably did. Jeff did not like Frank so well that he would go on living because of him. Each morning, Jeff probably got up and weighed his life. One of these days, he might decide it did not weigh enough.

  Next day, the Scouts were given leave in Kroonstad. Though he was sick from rum, Frank went downtown by himself and bought a sheet of paper, a pencil, and an envelope.

  Hello Madeleine and Jim

  This is your son Frank. Somebody probably told you I’m dead.

  I was only lost. Now I am a Canadian Scout. My commander is

  Charlie Ross from Lethbridge. Charlie writes letters to the

  Lethbridge newspaper, so if you see that, you will know what I am

  up to. The Boers aren’t beat yet. Say hello for me to Uncle Doc.

  Your son, Frank

  Transvaal, August—October 1901

  Though they never saw each other, Colonel Rimington and Colonel Benson were having a contest. They were Kitchener’s two top tiger-springers, and each of their successful dawn raids or taking of convoys was like a goal in a polo match. No one kept score but there was the idea of competition and who was winning all the same.

  In August, Rimington had the upper hand. But, as September started, Benson went on a winning streak. He tiger-sprang Boer laagers with eerie regularity. What Benson had over Rimington was Aubrey Wools-Sampson, an intelligence officer who was a veteran of the failed Jameson Raid. Imprisoned by the Boers, he had been offered amnesty by Paul Kruger and had refused it. He’d insisted on staying in jail so that no one could ever say he’d taken a favour from a Boer. In the new conflict, he was a fanatical Boer-hater and would go to any extent to outfox and defeat the Dutchmen. His ace in the hole was a network of black spies, men who went around the African kraals and asked people what they’d seen: information Wools-Sampson would piece together to set up Benson’s next attack.

  On September 10, a Benson night attack surprised a camp of Boers south of Middelburg. Immediately, he tiger-sprang again and landed on another Boer laager at Tweefontein. Still in the same week, Benson night-marched forty miles from Carolina and hit a laager at Middeldrift. He could do no wrong.

  During the same period, Rimington was only slightly less successful. On September 14, he hit a laager at Leufontein. A week later, he overtook Strydom’s commando and made a haul. Loot and thirteen prisoners. Rimington was working on his own network of black spies.

  Both men knew what would win the contest: the capture of Louis Botha or Christiaan De Wet. Whatever else they did, that was the main chance they watched for.

  Come September 15, the Boers wanted to do something big to show their contempt for Kitchener’s proclamation of eternal banishment. Louis Botha’s choice was to march southeast and invade Natal. Along the way, Botha destroyed the British tiger-springer Major Gough and two hundred and eighty-five of his men, but the invasion plan failed nonetheless. In October, during the spring rains, Mike Rimington teamed up with Col. Sir Henry Rawlinson on a plan to attack Botha as he tried to get back into the Transvaal.

  Frank and Jeff were part of the Botha expedition. For several days after they resupplied at Standerton, the combined columns marched northeast in slow and cumbersome fashion, giving the impression of the kind of flying column that always arrives too late. Then came the night march. After dark, they flew along as fast as their horses could travel, and the rumour among the men was that Rimington’s spies had given him the exact farm where Botha was sleeping tonight.

  In the final half-hour of night, Frank and Jeff lay on the lip of the bowl containing the farm. Black spies went down barefoot and returned to say there were many horses in the stable and many more tied outside.

  In the pre-dawn light, the whistles blew. As they raced into the yard, men and horses started spilling from everywhere. The farm looked like a smoked-out anthill. Several horsemen got away under fire before the British could pull the edges of their circle tight. Their own horses were too spent to give chase.

  Rawlinson and Rimington set outposts, corralled their prisoners, and began interrogations. A couple of Boer boys with guns to their heads admitted that Louis Botha had slept there. When every pile of hay and dung had been poked with bayonets, and every crevice and bush was searched, they had to admit that the prize Rimington needed to win his contest with Benson had got away.

  Jeff and Franks job was to examine the captured remuda. They were hoping to add a horse or two to thei
r own strings. But, the look of the Boer horses was disheartening. Going to Natal and back had sapped them. They were fit for not much more than an aas vogel’s dinner.

  Inside the sad herd, they found one saddled horse who was much better fleshed. A compact gelding, solid brown. The initials LB were on the fender, and any remaining doubt was erased by the contents of the saddlebag; notes to and from Botha. Tied to the saddle by a string was Botha’s hat, and Frank and Jeff knew that was on its way to a glass case in some officer’s country home.

  Frank and Jeff stayed with the intelligence officer, who was looking at every tiny aspect of the horse. They could not help but dream of making him their own. Then an officer’s flunky led him away to the house the officers had taken for their headquarters.

  After a day’s searching, they camped at the farm. It rained all night. Come morning, Rawlinson and Rimington announced that the soldiers could rest another day and night before continuing. Because of the rules of tiger springing, the men had no blankets, only their sodden greatcoats. They built smoky fires on whichever side of the buildings was most out of the lashing rain. Those who could crowded into the barn, watching the house’s chimney smoke.

  Some general or colonel was bound to write in a memoir that their pluck was glorious to see. But Frank knew by the snake eyes around him what everyone thought: that the holiday was nothing but a chance to catch dysentery, and that they would be better off in their saddles, returning to Standerton.

  After his escape from Rimington and Rawlinson, Louis Botha stepped back into the Transvaal and started west. At the same time, Colonel Benson was following orders to burn farms and gather families, livestock, and booty around Bethel. The result was a lumbering three hundred and fifty-vehicle convoy slobbering through the rain. Benson was trying to get to the Delagoa line at Balmoral.

  On October 30, Benson’s convoy was strung out two miles and beset by lightning. His rearguard sent a rider to say the Boers were threatening. They had been harrying the convoy for days, but the officer who sent the message thought this was something more. Benson gathered some men and rode back through the lightning flashes. When he got to his rearguard, he told them to go to higher ground. He told the gunners to deploy as fast they could.