The Great Karoo

by Fred Stenson

  For a minute, the sham line fooled the Boers. As they passed the fires, they wavered. The New Zealanders focused their fire, but the Boers kept coming. Instead of simply escaping once they’d overrun the trenches, they wheeled and attacked along the hill. They rolled up the line until a half-mile hole was torn in it.

  De Wet held back in the dark, waiting for the charge to succeed. But, when he gave the command for the rest of his army and his refugees to follow him, they would not. No matter how he flailed at them with his sjamboek, most would not believe there was a hole beyond those fires. They went against De Wet, running into the quieter space to the south. De Wet could do nothing but grab his son Isaac by the hand and escape.

  The morning after the Boers broke through the line, Frank returned to the prison camp. The Irishmen and Alice Kettle were not there. The officer into whose hands Frank had consigned them claimed not to know where they were. Eventually, Frank found an old Zulu man who had been among the guards.

  With a bit of English and hand signs, the Zulu told the story. When De Wet’s Boers broke through, the guards thought they would be attacked. Half of them ran away. Those who stayed, the Zulu included, were in trenches beyond the wagon circle. By the time they knew De Wet had passed by, some of the prisoners had climbed the cliff and escaped.

  Wessel Wessels’ Farm, March 1902

  On March 4, the column commanders at Harrismith were told to reverse themselves yet again. Someone had heard that Lord Kitchener wanted to “flatten the Boers,” and some wit responded that the mechanism had gone from a piston to a sad iron.

  By going north to the Vaal and then west to the central railway most believed they would catch nothing; that they would wear out thousands of horses for no purpose.

  Two days into the drive, the Canadian Scouts were crossing a farm that belonged to Boer commandant Wessel Wessels. Beside a little creek descending to the Wilge River, their line was interrupted by a steep rock wall. The creek ran along its foot. One of the keener Scouts traversed the cliff. Behind a screen of creepers he saw a shadow and continued climbing until he came to it. It was the mouth of a cave, and suddenly he was in a huge room within the cliff.

  Near the entrance was a Krupp field gun. Farther inside, he found a Maxim-Nordenfeldt, a pom-pom, and a heliograph system. It was only the beginning. When he picked up some papers and brought them into the sunlight, he saw they were letters addressed to Christiaan De Wet. He had found De Wet’s storehouse and hiding place.

  The Canadian Scouts poured up the cliff and pressed into the cave. Charlie told them not to disturb anything but they poked around anyway. Ever since the war began, there had been a legend about Kruger’s gold, a fortune from the Rand mines secreted somewhere. In this most promising of places, they could hardly keep from looking.

  Charlie wanted to give a speech, and was grinning as he did so. Exactly one week ago, Morant and Handcock had been shot against a wall outside Pretoria Gaol. He had wondered, given that and other black clouds forming, if he would ever be happy again. But, being a betting man, he also did not overlook the possibility that all of his rotten luck might turn after the Breaker’s execution; that better luck might be on the way.

  “Whatever else they say about me, boys—pretty bad stuff, as you know—this here find of Boer treasure is what will be beside Charlie Ross’s name in the history books. Charlie Ross and his Canadian Scouts discovered the biggest Boer arsenal ever found in the war. That’s what they’ll write, and every damn one of us will have that bit of fame to point to.”

  They could not empty the cave in a day. A pulley system had to be brought in to lower the heavy pieces to the valley floor. Many wagons were needed for transport. In the end, a pyre was built with the rest and the man who found the cave got the honour of touching it off.

  Standerton

  Living in the pleasant confines of the railway paddock at Standerton, Dunny’s lameness had become worse. The erosion of bone in her foot had continued. Paul, whom Frank had left in charge, was heartbroken, and Frank had a tough time making him believe he was not to blame.

  The problem now was what to do with the mare. The officer in charge of the railway corral had been complaining for weeks about a ruined horse taking feed and space. Part of Paul’s distress was caused by the daily argument to keep the dun from being shot.

  Frank had stopped in when the drive north from Harrismith swung by Standerton. After the current drive, he and his troopers were to take part in another even longer one: from the central railway to the headwaters of the Vaal. It felt like he was out of options.

  Jeff and The Blue had come along for the ride. Now Jeff asked Frank, “What does your dun mare like best?”

  Frank considered the question seriously. He stared at Dunny. She and The Blue were standing on opposite sides of the fence, their necks pressed together. For all of Frank’s journeys with his mare, he knew the answer to Jeff’s question was not himself.

  “The Blue,” Frank said.

  “Then let her come along.”

  To make things easier on Dunny, Frank did not return to the central railway with Jeff. He took her out of the railway corral and pampered her in his own camp. After a dozen days had passed, Jeff returned to tell Frank that Rimington’s column was close by, headed west—and that Charlie Ross was furious again.

  At the British camp, Frank went straight to Charlie for his abuse.

  “You take all that goddamn time because of a horse, then you turn up here and the bastard’s lame? I tell you, Adams, there ain’t much of this war left, but you might get court-martialled yet.”

  Back with the drive, Frank rode the Boer gelding and let Dunny pick her way along behind. She wore a halter for show, but no rope. Frank had two bandages in his saddlebag and some ointment, and twice a day he spun off one bandage and spun on the other. To anyone who asked how the leg was coming, he said, “Just fine.”

  They went to Vrede and Tafelkop and Odendal. When they made it to the Drakenbergs, the spine of South Africa, a morning came when Dunny would not get up. The Blue stood over her, coaxing, and finally the dun bucked herself onto three legs but would not touch the ground with the fourth. The slightest pressure and she jerked the hoof back in shock and anger.

  Jeff tied The Blue and held the dun for Frank as he gently flexed the fetlock and set the ruined foot onto his lap. He looked for something new, a spine, a shell fragment, but there was nothing like that. Something Dunny could not walk without had simply disintegrated.

  Frank let the leg go. He started for where he had left his carbine, but Jeff called him back.

  “I’ll do it,” he said.

  Frank stood and thought. Some reflex of mind wanted to say, No, no, I can handle it, but Frank found it to be untrue. He could not handle it, and there was no living person he trusted more than Jeff to do it properly. Frank nodded.

  Jeff gave The Blue to Frank to hold. She snorted and threw her head when she saw Jeff leading the dun mare away. Jeff and Dunny passed out of sight behind some bush.

  Drakenberg Escarpment

  The Canadian Scouts were crowded onto one of the long knuckles of the Drakenbergs, looking down into the big green sea of the low veldt. Their new leader, Capt. Alex MacMillan, had brought them here for a drink of whisky.

  Two days earlier, four military policemen had arrived from Pretoria and demanded to see Charlie Ross. They took him into his tent, and fellows hanging around heard aggressive questioning and plenty of cursing from Charlie. The policemen searched his tent and all his belongings, including his saddlebags.

  Whether or not Colonel Rimington had known this was coming, it was he who came to MacMillan and asked if, as one of the original Canadian Scouts, Alex would accept command. When Alex asked what Charlie was accused of, the colonel shook his head. Either he did not know or would not say.

  They confined Charlie to his tent. Alex asked Mike Rimington if he could go talk with him, because if he was going to lead the Scouts, he wanted to know everything Charlie knew.
They were in there a long time and the men outside said the two were telling stories and having a good laugh.

  Two guards were ordered to watch Charlie overnight. They were told to sit outside his tent, on either side of its door flap. The camp was near the escarpment, so when Charlie cut his way out the back and snuck his best horse off the line, all he had to do was find one of the game trails that snaked down into the fever lands.

  Officially, Charlie had deserted and stolen an army horse. But what the hell? He was charged with stealing Boer property and government property anyway. Everybody’s guess was that Charlie would soon be in Portuguese Mozambique, sitting in a Lourenço Marques café. He could catch a boat to anywhere in the pro-Boer world and be free.

  As the horses stood in an arc on the escarpment’s edge, Alex dug out two bottles of whisky. He opened them and held them out over the chasm. “To Charlie,” he said.

  It took a while for the bottles to go around, for each of a hundred men to drink to Charlie Ross.

  Part Eleven

  PEACE

  Aldershot, April 1902

  General Butler found it comical: watching Milner pretend to be interested in discussing peace with the Boers; watching Kitchener pretend there was any condition the Boers could ask for that he would not readily grant.

  It had started with a message to Kitchener in March, from Schalk Burger, acting Transvaal president. Burger said he and other Transvaal leaders wanted to open peace negotiations and, as a first step, would need to discuss matters with their Orange Free State counterparts. Having proclaimed all Boer rebels still in the field to be criminals doomed to banishment, Kitchener could not openly welcome the suggestion. He let others convey his acceptance for him.

  The result was safe conduct through the lines for the Transvaal leaders and a free train ride to Kroonstad. This happened at the same time as Britain was assembling a sixteen thousand-strong army to fight De La Rey in the west.

  No wonder Tolstoy called his book War and Peace, not War Then Peace or War Before Peace. War was a Punch and Judy show. Judy hits Punch over the head with a club. The couple come together and kiss. Punch sneaks his club behind Judy’s back and gives her another one.

  Most bizarre symbol of all, Cecil Rhodes contrived to die in Cape Town on March 27, so that while the Boer generals rode the rails to discuss peace, the flowered corpse of the man who had tried harder than anyone to start the war rode by in an elaborate funeral train, en route to his burial in Rhodesia.

  Butler was struck by recent similarities in his own household. When he stated that he could no longer be a British general, the roof had fallen in. Elizabeth collapsed in a chair and wept, then rose back up and raked him with abrasive commentary. When the drama was complete, Butler was so far from his original position he could barely see it with the naked eye. He was no longer contemplating anything as punishing to his family as immediate resignation, but was planning to wait out the war and see what crumbs fell. The aftermath of such a corrupt and divisive war should be rife with commissions of inquiry. Among the generals, Butler was a popular choice to lead these, because he could read, write, and add.

  Soon the rebel delegates in South Africa would have their meeting, would emerge with their peace proposal. Its list of conditions would be unreasonable (independence for the republics, total amnesty). Milner would pop up and cry, “Preposterous!” Kitchener would rise to his wearisome height and drawl, “Now, let’s not reject this too hastily.” Britain as a whole would convulse and roll around the floor. The mob would bray up and down the streets.

  But, though Butler could not say exactly why he believed it, he did think that, this time, the head beating on the wall would bring the wall down. Wording would be fiddled. Vagueness would be accepted as substance. That which could not be said would not be said, and the other side would pretend not to notice. In the end, it would have passed from generals and governors into the hands of those who massage such things for a living; who can make the most violently opposed statements meet in some imaginary middle.

  Kitchener would have his way. Just as Elizabeth had.

  Standerton, April 1902

  When Rimington’s column returned from the Drakenberg Escarpment, they stopped at Standerton. It was the first of April.

  Their march had been too remote for news to reach them, and suddenly they were surrounded by newspapers, telegrams, and wagging tongues, all talking about peace. The Boer leaders had met at Kroonstad, then moved under British safe conduct to Klerksdorp. De Wet, Botha, Steyn—even De La Rey was there. A little match glow of peace was roving the darkness. Some tried to blow it out. Some tried to guide it to its candle.

  Though Rimington was careful not to say anything about the peace negotiations, his column’s “resupply day” turned into “a delay until further notice.” They were moved to a well-used camping ground on the town’s downwind edge. The officers talked the quartermaster out of a quantity of tents.

  Frank, Jeff, and their troopers bedded down in two bad-smelling tents and did not rise until six. They were barely up when they were called together by their lieutenant and given a lecture about slackness. Colonel Rimington wanted them reminded that there had been peace negotiations before, and that previously the Boer leadership had used such delays to rest up and rearm their commandos. If the current peace effort came to nothing, the Boers would come back at them like wolves.

  Frank wondered at first what the lecture was about, but then he looked around and realized there was a kind of carnival feel to this camp at Standerton. Though De La Rey and De Wet were still dangerous, the overall war felt spent. The Boer towns they had passed through on their way east and then west were trying desperately to get back to normal living.

  If the people were sick of the war, so were the men fighting it. Most colonials wanted to get back home, wherever home was. The Tommys were dreaming of cozy pubs, plump girls, and pints of yellow beer. Probably Johnny Boer was thinking similar things. If they didn’t stop soon, the bitter-enders on both sides would be fighting this war by themselves.

  As Frank watched, and in spite of the dire predictions of the officers, the filthy camp at Standerton became slacker still. Acres of men boiled lice out of their uniforms and groomed each other like monkeys. Rugby scrums. Regimental tug-of-wars. Beard trims. Boot repair. Scavenging for rum.

  After a few days of this, Frank started watching Jeff Davis. There was no specific reason—Jeff was calm and mild all day long—but Frank kept expecting something. He was like the man who stares at a blue sky and predicts a tornado.

  If Frank knew anything about Jeff’s moods, it was that inaction frustrated him and took away his hope. When they had been threatened with Kitchener’s Machine, Jeff had begun drinking. On their last independent patrol before the super piston, he had stood on a boulder and sky-lined himself for the shooting.

  What they faced now was even more passive than the Machine. It was the final trickling out of the war, and maybe, as Alice Kettle had suggested, peace was what Jeff Davis feared most.

  So when Frank saw Jeff get up from their daytime fire and leave without a stated purpose, he assumed he was headed for a bender and would not be seen for days. In fact, Jeff came back to Frank and the troopers in a couple of hours. He had been drinking but was not drunk. He was excited.

  He had been at the officers’ fire, and the talk had been of renewed action in the West Transvaal. Gen. Ian Hamilton had been selected by Kitchener to command thirteen columns there: to chase and tackle General De La Rey. Far from seeing any contradiction with the peace negotiations, Kitchener felt some sharp battles in the background would keep the discussions serious and short.

  They had also been talking about the Second Canadian Mounted Rifles, in Africa since February. At the end of March, there’d been a serious fight at Hart’s River in which Casey Callaghan had lost two scouts and had several more wounded. The Second CMR had fifty casualties, quite a few of them killed.

  Listening to Jeff, Frank guessed where the
talk was going. Jeff would say the scrap between Hamilton and De La Rey might be the last big fight of the war. He would say he wanted in on it. As Jeff kept on about the various men who would be out there—Rawlinson, Kekewich, Evans, Callaghan, Charlie Tryon, Lieutenant Moodie—Frank was thinking, This is it. If Alice Kettle was right, and Frank thought she was, now was when he must let his friend choose.

  Jeff slapped his hands down on his knees: a gesture of completion, of action about to be taken.

  “So what I think I should do is talk to Alex MacMillan and Rimington. I think we should try and go there.”

  As soon as Frank realized that Jeff meant for all of them to go, it wasn’t Jeff’s death he was weighing but that of his troopers. He felt strongly that, if he went with Jeff, the other three should stay out of it. They were too close to getting out of the war unscathed.

  Danny pushed forward. His face was red. He stared Frank in the eye.

  “Why not, sir?” he asked. “We aren’t green anymore. You made us soldiers. You should let us act like ones.”

  The Australians nodded their agreement.

  Jeff jabbed Frank in his shoulder.

  “Come on, boss. Let’s go.”

  Captain MacMillan agreed to a week’s leave for all of them—longer, if they needed it. He offered to come with them to Colonel Rimington, who was expected to object. Rimington’s orders to his officers had been to keep the men from thinking the war was over. As soon as Jeff made the request, Rimington returned to that argument.