The Missionary's Wife

by Tim Jeal

  The shouting was becoming clearer. Francis asked Seda what it meant.

  ‘It is their way, sah. They say the spears of the young men are thirsty. “We will grind our spears on your bones. Like winnowed chaff you will be driven before our …”’

  Seeing the woebegone faces of his runners, Francis laughed. ‘They’re in for a surprise, eh?’

  Although his enemies were too far away to be harmed, Francis gave the order to explode some mines. It might discourage them from digging sniping pits close to the barricades. Great fountains of earth leapt up into the air, showering the closest tribesmen with clods and stones; but very few of them retreated. Their shouting dwindled briefly to a murmur but soon rose again. Francis walked along the barricades, giving last-minute advice.

  ‘Defend your front. Don’t worry about anything else … Remember, dead men don’t sweat. A sweating corpse is faking, so finish him off.’

  Francis had split the camp into sectors and given orders for so many men from each of them to hold themselves in readiness to move to any sector that might be under pressure. If only he could foresee where the natives would drive home their main attack, what a blessing that would be! But at least they did not make use of the dazzling first light. It was much later when a tall warrior ran forward, brandishing an assegai with a long shaft. He threw off his leopardskin kaross and stood naked save for his loincloth. His spear was raised, his muscles were flexed, and as he flung his weapon, he shouted in a ringing voice, ‘Buya quasi!’ The warriors behind him roared, ‘Bulala, bulala!’ stamping their feet. Francis did not ask Seda to translate.

  They attacked in long lines, slowly at first, but as Francis’s sharpshooters started to pick them off at several hundred yards, they began to advance with stuttering rushes, flinging themselves down for a few seconds before worming their way forward on their stomachs, and then resuming their brief dashes. Francis wondered why none of these men were armed with rifles. If a few were to lie down and shoot at the hussars’ firing line, they would greatly improve the chances for the rest to reach the outer perimeter. Then he realized that they were deliberately tempting his gunners, in a self-sacrificing effort to unmask the strength and number of his guns. Francis at once sent runners to the crews of each Maxim. No one was to fire unless the warriors came within twenty-five paces. Even when these attackers came close enough to hurl their spears, Francis did not countermand his order.

  Only when a new and larger assault was launched did he signal to his gun crews, and as the first wave surged forward, the Maxims scythed them down. Within minutes, the attack was broken and many lay dead. Others dragged themselves away. After the guns ceased chattering, the cries of the wounded sounded very loud. Francis yelled up to his men on the lookout.

  ‘Have the Matabele moved yet?’

  James Gradwell looked down. ‘Not yet, sir.’

  Back at the outer barricade, Francis could see through his glasses that men were still emerging from the woods. Some were pulling thornbushes and logs. Would these be brought close to the camp’s defences to provide cover for snipers?

  Trooper Birch stepped forward from the other runners. He looked pale and scared. ‘They’ll light them, sir. Like when Mr Fynn was killed.’

  Francis was not convinced. ‘They’ll use branches to fire the grass?’

  ‘I swear they will, sir.’

  ‘But it’s too damp to burn properly.’

  Francis understood only when he noticed that they were carrying green boughs as well as dry kindling. A gentle breeze was blowing across the camp. Smoke, he thought. When their main thrust was launched, it would be through clouds of smoke. He raced over to the nearest seven-pounder and ordered the crew to elevate for eight hundred yards and open up. The more natives they could kill before the fires were burning, the better their chances of survival would be. Along the firing line, his men’s bayonets caught the morning sunlight like pale flames.

  As his field guns began lobbing case shot into the ranks of the waiting warriors, Francis struggled with his water flask. Damn his wounded hand. Because everyone knew that fear dried out the mouth, he disliked having to ask his runners to pour drinks for him. The exception was Wilfred Birch, whose terror made Francis pity him.

  At first the natives lit their fires too far away, and the smoke failed to reach the camp. Regardless of shells and rifle fire, they came on steadily. At a heavy cost in lives, they built up a long line of smouldering heaps topped off with armfuls of damp grass. The billowing smoke made the hussars cough and rub their eyes, as moment by moment they waited for dark shapes to burst from the murk. From time to time, Francis ordered his Maxim gunners to fire into the smoke, in the hope that screams would betray his enemies’ approach.

  Suddenly the bellowing of oxen and the thunder of hooves was heard. ‘From the north,’ yelled Carew from the lookout. Men raced towards the threatened quarter. Maxims were slewed around on their mountings. As the charging beasts loomed through the smoke, no one spotted the oxhide shields in among them, so perfectly did they blend. The points of spears could have been tips of horns, and windswept armlets nothing but flowing tails. Running with the oxen were scores of warriors, jabbing at the maddened creatures with their assegais, driving their great weight toward the earth-filled sacks that barred their way.

  ‘Fire!’ Francis roared, running along the barricade behind the riflemen, his scabbard thumping uselessly against his leg. The stammering rattle of the Maxims steadied him; the hussars were firing frantically, their fingers flying to triggers and bolts, plucking cartridges from bandoliers. The reek of cordite merged with the universal bonfire smoke.

  ‘Your revolver!’ shouted Francis to the bemused Birch. He had no time to explain that he had lent his own Colt to the missionary’s widow and could not use his carbine with a damaged hand. Clara had known best. Even in his left hand the revolver felt useful. A spear fell at his feet and he scarcely noticed. Sergeant Barnes ran up.

  ‘They’re attacking from three sides, sir.’ Barnes swung his index finger around like a weather vane. His tone was accusing, as if it were somehow Francis’s fault that after twenty-five years in the regiment he might never wear his long-service medal. The barricade behind the sergeant erupted. Oxen crashed through the wall of earth-filled sacks, pitching a hussar into the air. Another man fell under their hooves. Warriors were pouring through the breach. Hand-to-hand fights swayed back and forth: bayonet against assegai, rifle butt against club. There was no time to reload and no breath to spare, and many grim struggles took place in silence.

  While battle raged about him, Francis sent his runners to make sure the Maxims continued firing into the smoke. If the numbers entering could be kept low, the camp might still survive. The inner laager had not yet been breached. From behind the wagons came the whinnying of frightened horses. Hussars were lying on their stomachs, firing between the spokes of the wagon wheels. Troopers were hit by their comrades’ bullets. Africans killed each other by firing as they ran.

  At last the Matabele entered the attack. With less smoke to shield them, many fell early to the gusts of bullets that whipped the grass. But the numbers reaching the barricades did not seem small to the defenders. Like a black wave crested with white plumes, they swept down on the camp. Some were shot in the act of mounting the parapet, others while flinging aside the heaped up thornbushes at the base of the barricades.

  Francis had begun to detach men from the outer defences to fight the intruders inside the perimeter. He ordered his new groups to cover the backs of the riflemen at the barricades and to engage and kill all natives breaking through. Men on both sides fought like gladiators, for it was a case of kill or be killed. A man fought till he received his death blow or dropped from exhaustion. There was nowhere to run.

  Francis saw many bullet holes in the canopy of the hospital wagon. Fearing for Clara’s life, he ran towards it. A man with red-circled eyes and a chest dotted with white war paint crossed his path. Francis fired and missed. The warrior drew back
his spear, poised to strike. As Francis flung up an impotent arm, the man cringed as if punched from behind. A red hole had appeared in the middle of his chest. Sergeant Barnes lowered his carbine.

  ‘Bad business,’ he gasped, running up.

  Francis could not smile. His lips were too dry, and his tongue felt like leather. ‘Thank you, Sergeant,’ he mumbled.

  He looked around in puzzlement. The shooting had all but stopped. A ragged cheer went up along the defences. Francis ran to see for himself. In several places, Africans lay in mounds across the face of the barricades. Dead cattle were scattered everywhere. Already vultures were landing. The cries of the wounded rose plaintively on every side. Francis hurried to the lookout.

  ‘What do you think?’ he shouted.

  Carew came down the ladder, followed by an ecstatic James Gradwell. ‘We really showed ’em. Didn’t we, sir?’

  Carew said quietly, ‘There’s as many as ever near the trees.’

  Francis nodded grimly and headed for the hospital tent. Dr Lane’s shirt was like a butcher’s apron. The wounded lay waiting in rows. Raising his voice above the cries for water, Francis told Lane that he meant to carry Mponda outside so he could see how many of his people had died.

  ‘Won’t do any good, Captain.’

  ‘I’ll be the judge of that, Doctor.’ But even as Francis replied, he knew that Lane was right.

  Francis was leaving the tent, when Sergeant Barnes was brought in by three men. His lips foamed with blood, and his eyes were starting from his head. His hands were tugging at a spear buried deep in his abdomen. A trooper piped up, ‘One of their wounded did it, sir.’

  Francis’s head was swimming. A minute earlier, Barnes had saved his life; now he was as good as dead. When he could trust himself to speak, Francis sent Birch racing away with orders for Carew. The officer was to disarm all wounded natives and, with Seda’s help, to question them about their leaders’ intentions. Only then did Francis turn towards the hospital wagon.

  Clara had stayed with Mponda during the fighting. As soon as the firing stopped, she stepped down from the tailboard and peered out from the inner laager into the camp beyond. She swayed on her feet. Longing to turn back, she found herself rooted. Nothing had prepared her for the horror. Piles of bodies, black and white, lay under the pitiless sun, the wounded tangled up with the dead. Worse than the sights were the sounds: sobs, curses, pleas – a constant babble of noise, cut through by screams. And all the time the drone of thousands of flies.

  ‘Water! Water!’ She heard the word endlessly repeated. Shaking with shock, she looked about as if, miraculously, jugs of water might appear. Dr Lane’s scarlet face loomed before her.

  ‘You must help me, Mrs Haslam.’ He caught her roughly by the arm.

  ‘Me?’ Her heart was bumping, and she thought she might vomit. These men were so badly hurt she hardly dared look at, let alone touch, them.

  ‘You can hold a cup of water, can’t you?’ His scorn reached her. ‘Get that boy of yours to help. Bandages must be tight enough to stop the blood. Come with me.’

  She hardly recognized the kindly man who had tended Mponda. He spoke harshly, and his face was contorted by rage and pity. The hairs on his arms were matted with blood. His shirt was torn and stained. Clara followed him humbly.

  Ten minutes later, armed with scissors, bandages, a bucket, and a metal cup, she and Simon were working alongside Dr Lane and his assistants. The stench of blood and excrement almost choked her, but the men’s desperation overcame her fear. To hear grown men sob like children was terrible, and when she had to lift the wounded, or roll them over to bandage a limb, their groans were pitiable. Most were too badly hurt to be saved even by hands more skilful than hers. Their gratitude just to see her made Clara ashamed of her earlier dread. Many clutched at her dress to detain her, obliging her to tuck the hem into her waistband. Sweat trickled down her back, and her bodice stuck to her as if glued. Even the shock of kneeling down to help a man she then discovered was dead grew less as time passed. She found she could close a corpse’s eyes without revulsion.

  The most miserable sufferers were the wounded Africans. They gave no quarter in battle themselves, and therefore expected none now that they were prisoners. A man with a shattered thigh dashed away her cup when she offered it – though he was dying of thirst. She guessed he thought her a witch with a poisoned vessel. The Africans’ eyes followed her every movement, as if a hidden knife might suddenly flash in her hand. Their terror sent an answering fear through her veins. Would she too be dying by evening, her body pierced and mutilated?

  When Clara spotted Francis supervising repair work on the shattered barricades, she ran across to him, her hands red with the blood of men she had been tending. For everyone’s sake she had to get through to him. She came up very close, so the men in the working party would not be able to hear her.

  ‘It’s not too late to save ourselves.’

  ‘By freeing him?’

  His resentful tone dismayed her, but she said firmly, ‘I’m sure he’ll persuade his headmen to let us go.’

  ‘How are you sure? He couldn’t control the men who killed your husband. Why should these others listen to him? Least of all when he’s sick.’

  ‘He’s their chief.’

  ‘There are other tribes involved.’

  ‘How could they possibly attack us more fiercely if you free him?’ Her voice was trembling. ‘Must I go down on my knees? I’ve never asked anything else from you.’

  He said sharply, ‘Africans respect strength, not whining.’

  ‘All right,’ she shouted, ‘fight to the death. It won’t save any settlers or their families. But if Mponda sends his men home, think of the lives you’ll have saved.’ With all her strength, Clara willed him to agree with her. ‘If you love me,’ she whispered now, ‘free him.’ He looked so dazed and lost that she could not believe he would resist.

  After a long pause, he said quietly, ‘I’ll make no promises until my interpreter has finished with the prisoners.’

  Francis closed his eyes as Clara walked away. It had taken all his resolution not to give in to her. Moments before her arrival, he had learned that the Maxims’ ammunition was running low and that the rest of his men had only enough cartridges to last two days at the present rate of firing. If the enemy abandoned caution and threw everything at the camp, the end would come swiftly. Francis’s deepest instincts told him that on no account should he do anything indicating weakness.

  The cries of the dying became more harrowing as the day went on. While Carew and Seda interrogated prisoners, Francis gave orders for canvas screens to be put up to shield wounded tribesmen from the full heat of the sun. Then he sat down under the shade of the lookout platform and wrote a pencil note to his mother on the pad he used when writing messages for his runners. It was not a long letter, and his writing was very clumsy, since he had to use his left hand.

  Ibanula Camp, 13th July 1896

  My dearest mother,

  I am writing to you during a lull in the fighting. We are surrounded in country that does not favour a breakout, being hilly and heavily wooded. So we will have to stay on here and fight to a finish. Of course I blame myself, but we had a good chance to end the rebellion at a stroke, and with just a little luck might have pulled it off. I would do it all again, I know. We will do our best to fight on till the end. Please don’t think I feel too badly. Of course I would rather live to be eighty. But when there’s no help for something, it’s much easier to face. My greatest regret is the pain my death will cause you, my dearest mother. Thanks to you I had a very happy boyhood. My period in the cavalry has also been a wonderful time for me. So please don’t think I should be pitied. I would hate that.

  Your loving son,

  Francis

  He thrust the letter into his shirt pocket, thinking that this garment would be less likely to be stripped from his body than his jacket. He wondered if Clara had written anything for her father and told himself
that she would have died much sooner if he had left her behind at Mponda’s kraal. Marrying Haslam had been the mistake that killed her. Yet nothing could make Francis feel less responsible. He wished he could have done as she had asked and freed the chief, but the Matabele would have thought he was trying to placate them. And why would they have relaxed their grip after that?

  Whenever Francis closed his eyes, she was there – and in all the places he had once longed to take her: the Royal Academy for the Summer Exhibition, Hurlingham for the polo, Gunter’s to eat ices, the garden of his childhood home to meet his mother. And now he knew that all his hopes had been delusions.

  Mark Carew was striding across the trampled grass, looking haggard, with Seda following like a ghost in his pale blanket. Francis beckoned them away from the lookout so their words would not be overheard. Carew tossed his helmet to the ground. ‘If this goes on, they’ll wipe us out. Every damn nigger says the same.’

  Francis found himself staring at a trail of blood spots on a patch of bare earth. He said calmly, ‘How long do they expect it to take?’

  ‘A day or two. Some say less.’

  Francis thought of his dwindling ammunition. ‘Time doesn’t worry them?’

  ‘Nothing does,’ snorted Carew.

  ‘What about their chief? Aren’t they worried about him?’

  ‘Why should they be? He can’t be hurt by our bullets. They all think that. The white nganga made him drink the blood of Lord Jizzus, and now he’ll live forever. We should show the stupid bastards.’ Carew’s face was fiercely animated. ‘Their leaders told them they’d be safe because he’d turn our bullets into water. Most of them wouldn’t have made it to the picket lines if they’d known the truth.’

  ‘Perhaps we should send him back,’ murmured Francis, as if thinking aloud. ‘They’d see his bullet wounds then.’

  Carew waved his hands dismissively. ‘What good would that do? They’d simply say we tried to kill him and failed. We must kill him, sir. It’s our only chance.’