The Great Karoo

by Fred Stenson

  Jeff’s eyes had gone to slits, but in his own drunkenness, Frank was sure Jeff heard him and understood what he meant. In this way, 1901 slid into 1902.

  In January, the Canadian Scouts were still tiger-springing around the Orange River Colony with Colonel Rimington. Now that Jeff had lost his access to the men in charge, Frank knew little beyond his orders. When he needed more, he went and sat with Hilliam and the other vets.

  The persistent topic was the new scheme Kitchener was about to throw at them. All through his blockhouse-building orgy, K of K had hinted at some final project that would use the blockhouse lines to crush Boer resistance. Any day now, the last two corrugated cans would be fitted together, and the soldiers were guessing what would happen. They saw themselves yoked to other columns, their daily work prescribed, their freedom curtailed. Without knowing anything for sure, they grumbled and cursed the plan.

  Another set of stories that came to camp, in the mail and with the supply convoys, involved Breaker Morant, an Australian who had killed Boer prisoners in the bush veldt north of Pretoria. It was a long story involving the murder of Morant’s best friend. In some ways, it was like the story of Gat Howard’s death. Morant and his men had committed several acts of revenge for which they were being tried for murder. Mentions of the trial depicted Morant as cocky and contemptuous.

  Then news came that Morant, Handcock, and Witton had been found guilty and were sentenced to death. The only question was whether Kitchener would send them before a firing squad.

  There was a local side to this story, which was that Charlie Ross was Breaker Morant’s friend. They had met on the march north, and had exchanged letters since. Things got worrisome when a supply teamster brought the news that Morant was telling his captors he had only done what others had done before him. Pressed for an example, he told of an oath taken by Charlie Ross and his Canadian Scouts. He said they had sworn never to take another Boer prisoner after the treacherous murder of their commander, Maj. Arthur Howard.

  After Charlie Ross threw Jeff Davis down beside their fire, Frank had added Jeff to their foursome. The five men marched and patrolled together. But Jeff was not like Frank had ever seen him. Even in the lazy days of the past winter, when he’d slept and drank through the early marches with Rimington, Jeff had never been this quiet and removed.

  Frank tried to lure Jeff back with appeals to the vanity of rank. He asked him, as ranking officer, to tell them what route to take, what strategy to employ. Jeff would only make a brushing motion with his hand. Go on the way you’re going, it said. If he spoke, the words were usually, “You know what to do.”

  Frank expected Jeff to drink, for this was what he had done during dark moods in the past, but Jeff only drank his rum ration and sought no more.

  When they were on patrol, Frank tried Jeff at every position in the line, lead to drag, but he would not pay any attention wherever he was. There was no choice finally but to leave him in the middle, where you’d put a flunky or a tourist.

  At their night fires, Frank studied Jeff as Jeff kept his eyes closed or stared at the sky. When Jeff had readily accepted his partnering with Ross, Frank had thought he wanted something he could not get as easily with Frank. Discarded by Ross, he seemed to have given up on whatever that was. Frank tried to find the link between that and the bursts of heroism. Cutting throats. Taking a rearguard on single-handedly. What did it mean to be so dangerously brave? Though he tried to find a different answer, Frank always came back to the idea of death. Jeff Davis had been trying to die in some way he could accept. Now, he seemed empty of even that ambition.

  In the third week of January, Colonel Rimington returned from a three-day trip and called a meeting of his unit leaders. The colonel had been away several times in January, and the reason was about to be revealed.

  When the officers left Rimington’s tent, Charlie Ross bustled through camp with a sheet of paper gripped in his hand. He shook it at any Scouts he passed, signalling everyone to his tent.

  They were camped at a farm near Bethlehem, and the Scouts had to shove in tight among the fruit trees surrounding Charlie’s tent. He was in front of the canvas, shunting back and forth, the page still in his fist. Frank sat on the ground, and Bert, Toby, and Danny mobbed him like dogs. Jeff stood separate, leaning on a tree.

  “Listen up,” Charlie said as he marched. He said it several times, even after everyone was settled.

  “Spit it out, Charlie!” yelled one of the older soldiers, one of those who never called Ross by his rank or sir.

  Finally, Ross started talking mumbo-jumbo about pistons ramming and super-columns rolling. They stared at the wiry campaigner from stone faces, and he became uneasy under their scrutiny.

  “What I’ve got here,” he shook the paper, “is a set of rules for how to operate this piston thing. At night, we’ll have three lines. First one’s made of fires. It’s false. Second and third are real. Every man’s on piquet for a third of every night.”

  Two men already had their hands up. Charlie was blind to them.

  “This here sheet of rules? I’ll post it on my tent. More copies are supposed to come. Maybe before you start fixing this plan, you should read it. You might want to remember it was made by General Kitchener and his top officers, including Colonel Rimington. I won’t try and answer if you’ve got complaints. You can take those up with the colonel. Tell him how you want to fix things.”

  Copies of the rules did arrive the next day. One man in every five had one. Frank had a copy for a while. He read it aloud to his troopers. An army spread between blockhouse lines. Digging a new trench each night. No fires, not even a single lit cigarette, after dark.

  The veterans who had predicted Kitchener’s plan would cramp their style were staggered by the truth of it. The plan had distilled war down to the elements most hated by soldiers: marching, boredom, digging in the ground.

  They had a week before the super-column rolled, and all over the Orange River Colony, leaders like Rimington saw it as a time for revenge. Rimington threw in his lot with Dawkins and Rawlinson on a plan to capture Manie Botha, one of the Boer leaders who had decoyed, trapped, and killed Colonel Damant. Aubrey Wools-Sampson, Colonel Benson’s legendary intelligence officer, was with Rawlinson now, and it was his spies who had reported that Manie Botha was on his way north, leading a convoy.

  They hoped to trap the Boer when his convoy crossed through a long, rugged chain of hills. Rimington was given a third of the hills to cover, and he sent his scouts to check every trail that wagons could possibly move on.

  The pass that Frank’s five were sent to search was one of the more remote possibilities: a high, seldom-used trail that would be extremely difficult for a heavily loaded wagon. But, given how many were out searching for the convoy, it was not impossible the Boers would resort to it.

  As Frank led his men to the summit, he was full of unease. The weathered trail ran up a slope of stone and scree that stopped at a U-shape between crumbled pinnacles. Out of sight, beyond that saddle was a cliff up which the trail from the south climbed. What worried Frank more than the convoy were the scouts they would be certain to send, to ensure the pass was clear above.

  As he rode, Frank felt sparks on his back and neck. These feelings came from the rocky line of a ridge above him to the left, a place where house-sized boulders were separated by deep shadow.

  A half-mile from the top, Frank checked behind him, and in his keyed-up state, the sight of Jeff Davis asleep in his saddle infuriated him.

  “Goddamn you, Jeff! Wake up and watch! For fuck sake!”

  Davis’s chin rose slowly. His eyes came even with Frank’s. Frank turned away and looked forward. To hell with him. He would get in no staring contest with a useless mute. He had a job to do and men to protect.

  Frank’s Boer gelding started forward. Frank twisted and saw The Blue set its haunches and leap. In a succession of jumps, the mare was climbing straight up the stony slope. Frank yelled for Jeff to stop, but the scout kep
t digging the mare with his spurs. At the bony ridge, they slipped out of sight.

  Frank started his horse up, climbing in switchbacks. Partway, he saw The Blue and Jeff come forward atop one of the boulders. Jeff shielded his eyes with one hand and looked around in mock surveillance. Skylined.

  Frank continued to the top, dismounted, and tied his gelding to a bush. He took the path between boulders and saw where The Blue must have jumped from rock to rock to gain the top.

  He came up on the opposite edge from The Blue. Jeff was slumped in the saddle now, his round back to Frank. Frank moved slowly, speaking The Blue’s name. When he came to her, he slid his hand along her throat latch and took hold of the bridle there. Jeff lowered the mouth of his carbine and pushed against Franks shoulder. Frank struck the rifle away and led the horse away from the edge.

  When Frank climbed down, he returned to his horse and waited. He heard the collision and the grunt as The Blue jumped down, and jumped again. Horse and man came out of the shadow.

  “Get down,” he told Davis.

  “Why, corporal? You going to arrest me? Fight me?”

  Frank was ashamed of this moment. He looked down to where his troopers were dismounted, watching. There was nothing he could say to Jeff Davis now. It was fixed the way it was.

  Frank untied his Boer horse and led him down. When he looked back, the place where Jeff and The Blue had been was empty. Later, he saw Jeff riding below the knuckled ridge toward the far pinnacles.

  When Davis had looked over the pass and started back. Frank told the boys to stay where they were. He went to the trail and waited. Davis stopped beside him. He was smiling.

  “Sorry, Frank,” he said. “I’ll give you no more trouble. The Boers aren’t coming this way.”

  He tapped The Blue and went forward at a walk. Frank and the troopers fell in behind him, and they rode for the point of rendezvous Colonel Rimington had given them this morning. In the last couple of miles, Jeff lengthened his lead. When they got to the camp, it was after dark, and Frank did not see him.

  Liebenbergsvlei, February 1902

  An hour before dawn, the whistles blew The order to move skipped up and down the line. When the soldiers stepped forward, thousands of oxen strained into their yokes behind them. Thousands of wagon wheels climbed out of the cups they’d pressed into the ground overnight.

  The head of the piston was a line of men fifty-four miles wide. It spread from one blockhouse line to another. The piston marched early to take advantage of the cool of the day, but the white sun rose into the naked sky and heated the glistening veldt. The light and heat weighed palpably, and the straightforward march made shade a lottery. Those whose place in line did dip down a shaded slope, or carved through a farmer’s blue-gum copse, were back in the sun before they had time to celebrate their luck.

  They had drank their fill from the Liebenbergsvlei River before they started, but they would hunger for water all day. With so many thousands wanting to drink, the water wagon you saw was always drained and going back for more.

  Though infernal, the day was not beyond endurance. Those with a talent for numbers deciphered that their twenty miles of marching hived one thousand square miles off the zone of Boer liberty. When the British stopped to build their lines and dig their trenches, the Boers began to feint at the line and to fire to the full extent of their field weapons.

  The second day was so much like the first they might have felt they were marching on the spot, except for their sergeants coming with maps to show their progress. The troops saw themselves closing the distance to the central railway, and how the southern columns would meet the rails first, near Honing Spruit, and then press northward. All the columns would tighten, and the mass would squeeze into the northwest corner, where the central railway and the Heilbron line converged at Wolvehoek Station.

  The sergeant who showed the map to Frank and his troopers had called the unknown quantity in front of them “the jelly.” During the third night, the jelly pushed back. Caught in the shrinking cavity, the Boers made determined charges against the piquets. Each time a Boer attack was thrown back, the men in the trenches cheered with relief. It would not be their place in line that broke.

  The final day’s march was brief, and when it halted Frank saw a scene he could barely comprehend. Like a stockyard, zoo, and land rush, all at once. Cattle, horses, oxen, and sheep milled around for hundreds of yards in all directions. Within that animal crush, Boer wagons stood like islands with their bucksails raised. Dusty children peered out the ends.

  Everything Frank set eyes on seemed terribly sad. A cow in search of her calf, bawling until the spittle flew, running so her tight bag whacked her legs—even that sight, so common in his life, seemed like something to weep over. Black voorlopers gripped oxen by their nose rings. The thirsty beasts, tongues hanging swollen and purple, tossed the handlers like puppets made of straw.

  The Boer families caught in the trap trudged and hung their heads, their hope exhausted. However bravely they had run before the British machine, they were now in its clutches. Frank had seen Indians exhausted this way, hollowed out by hunger and disease, left in the dust as land boosters passed them. Whether or not this lost country was a place the Boers had stolen in the first place, Frank found them tragic.

  The few actual rebels probably felt stupid for having been caught by something so cumbersome. They sat in the dirt alone or in pairs, their guns and bandoliers in piles away from them. They were being careful not to give a Tommy or colonial soldier any excuse to shoot them. Gripping their cold pipes in their teeth, they looked like Jeff Davis had in past weeks gone by: barely in touch with the world.

  Frank saw many worn and injured horses wandering abandoned. Also forgotten were the wild things. Springbok and impala flung themselves at the wire, again and again. Occasionally one would clear the height, only to land in more coils of wire between the doubled fence. They would fight and then lie still, their bloody sides heaving.

  Among the armoured trains huffing on the nearby sidings was one with more flags than the rest. In it were Lord Kitchener and The Brat. When everything was searched and tallied, and the Lord General was told how many rebels he’d caught, the train got up steam and huffed away.

  Wolvehoek/Vrede

  Frank did not see Jeff Davis during the first piston drive. Rimington and Charlie Ross did not inquire after him either, and Frank began to wonder if he would ever see Jeff again. Maybe he had been allowed to become a civilian, as Charlie Ross had. Maybe something worse.

  Then, camped at Wolvehoek, and just before they got word that the super-column was about to roll again, Jeff was at their fire, looking dirty but not too worse for wear. He apologized for his disappearance and said he had carried some dispatches for Charlie Ross into the West Transvaal. He’d even seen Casey Callaghan at a railway station, waiting for his Second Canadian Mounted Rifles. Jeff spoke freely and with humour, and it seemed that his dark fit had passed.

  For its second voyage, the piston was split. Half went south along the railway to a new starting point at Kroonstad. Frank’s half crossed the Vaal and would start from there. Both halves were to march west to east, with the expanse they had just scoured stranded between them. Near Frankfort, the north half would pivot right and form a back door. The two pistons would mash together in the box’s southeast corner.

  The news was out that Christiaan De Wet had escaped the first piston drive with the aid of a pair of wire cutters. A herd of cattle had escaped through the same hole in the fence. Kitchener was disappointed with his blockhouse system. That was why the piston’s second drive would come together in open country.

  After a long march west, the north half of the army came to its turning point. The hinge was close to Standerton, and Frank had a strong urge to visit Dunny. If she was better, he might bring her back with him. When he asked Jeff if he would cover for him, Jeff advised him against going. The country they were coming to was the roughest part of the march. Even if the dun mare was
better, travelling there would make her lame again. If Frank went to Standerton and found the horse still lame, it would only upset her when he left.

  When the piston wheeled, Rimington’s column landed on the far east edge, with its left shoulder to the Swazi frontier. The landscape rucked and roughened: rocks, cliffs, crags, defiles. To make a horse walk straight up a slope and down was bad for the legs at any time, and nonsensical here. But the officers insisted it be done that way, or the sweep would not be thorough. Only where straight-line marching would drop you off a cliff or down a hole were you allowed to deviate, and then you were supposed to go back and search on foot.

  South of Vrede, Frank and his troop were traversing jagged mountains. The jumbled stone was grown through with gorse. Dassies ran in the labyrinth. They came to a place where the rock suddenly divided into a ravine or kloof twenty feet wide. The riders had no choice but to follow the kloof to its end and go around.

  Moving west, they descended to a lower level and found the ravine’s west entrance. The rest of the cordon had passed already and, according to the rules, the notch should have been searched. Betting that no one had, Frank dismounted to do so. The chasm was black inside: cold and damp. He went forward clumsily, imagining snakes around his ankles. He cranked his neck to look upward, and saw the slice of pale sky was cross-hatched with roots and vines. He went as far as the first twist and pressed himself around the corner. Seeing nothing, he decided he had searched enough.

  Once he was back and they had ridden another hundred yards, Jeff turned The Blue in front of Frank’s horse and said, “There was someone in that hole.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Smelled their tobacco.”