Ghosts of the Past

by Tony Park

  At one stage Appleton had stormed out of the room and berated the captain. ‘I remind you again, this is my prisoner and I will deal with her as I see fit. You may very well claim to be operating under orders from Kitchener, but until I see any paperwork to that effect you will leave me to finish this business in peace, Captain.’

  The reference to Lord Kitchener, the British Army chief, intrigued her. If the raid had been staged to capture Nathaniel – and possibly her – then the fact that their mission had been compromised was the least of it. Captain Walters had told her that he knew she was a German spy, but he had still not seen fit to tell Appleton anything about that or the arms deal Claire was involved in. Walters was keeping quiet about it all, and that made her even more certain that he, like her, was more interested in the payment Nathaniel had been about to make than the guns themselves.

  There had been a fire that morning in the cell block. The smoke had crept down the corridor and seeped under her cell door. She had screamed and there had been a good deal more shouting from elsewhere in the guardhouse. She and the other two prisoners – one English and one Scottish soldier – had been hustled out onto the parade ground. There was a great deal of consternation among the guards and she was sure she overheard one of them saying a prisoner had escaped and another had been killed. She wondered what had become of the battered Australian sergeant, and if it might have been he who had fled. But he was the least of her worries right now.

  ‘Where’s this camp you’re taking me to?’ she asked the Scotsman seated opposite her.

  ‘Ye’ll find out soon enough. And there’ll be some company for ye,’ he replied.

  ‘Company?’

  ‘Ye’ll see.’

  The wagon turned off the main gravel road about an hour later and then creaked and jolted its way up a rutted track. Claire heard hoofbeats as the wagon slowed.

  ‘The farm’s just ahead,’ an English voice said, presumably to the driver of the wagon. Claire caught sight of a mounted British trooper, spurring his horse along.

  She smelled smoke and soon tiny flecks of ash were filling the wagon. As they turned and pulled to a halt Claire gasped at the sight of devastation that greeted her.

  The thatch roof of a whitewashed stone farmhouse was ablaze. The heat from the crackling orange flames stung her cheeks.

  A young Boer woman, her face gaunt beneath her bonnet, stood in the yard in front of the house and stared into the flames. Two children, a boy aged about five and a little girl, barely walking, clung to her long skirt. She raised a bony arm to her face to shield herself from the heat as the rafters collapsed. Three British soldiers surrounded her and motioned with their rifles for her to leave. She picked up two bags and turned from the blaze.

  Three dogs, huge sandy-coloured beasts that Claire recognised as Boerboels, barked ferociously at the soldiers and the burning house, but they were tethered by chains to a steel peg.

  Claire saw the white stripes on the woman’s grimy cheeks where the fire’s heat had cauterised her tears. The woman ushered her children in front of her and took one look over her shoulder. Two more English soldiers with shovels were filling in a hole. One of the men downed his tool and reached into the fresh earth. He shook the dirt from a white-painted wooden cross and rammed it into the ground.

  The woman came to the wagon and Claire reached down, offering her a hand. The woman took it with a nod and allowed Claire to help her aboard. The whites of her eyes, Claire saw, were bloodshot and red-rimmed from crying, or the smoke, or both. Her pupils were fixed and lifeless. She stared at the white canvas cover of the wagon as Claire took each of the children from the hands of a British Tommy without thanks. Finally, one of the soldiers threw the woman’s two bags into the back of the wagon.

  The woman flinched, but remained silent at the sound of a gunshot. There was a second shot, and then a third. The dogs stopped barking, one at a time.

  ‘Round up the cattle,’ a mounted officer called to the soldiers. ‘Torch the maize. Leave nothing for the bastards on commando. You know the drill.’

  The woman turned as the wagon started to move, and stared at the freshly filled grave.

  Claire reached across to her, placing a hand on the woman’s knee. ‘How can I help?’

  The woman turned her head and stared at Claire. ‘It was my child, in the grave.’

  ‘No! Did they . . . ?’

  ‘No,’ the woman said, shaking her head. ‘They didn’t kill her. She was stillborn, five weeks ago, but the grave was still fresh, you understand?’

  Claire shook her head, unsure of what the woman meant.

  ‘The Tommies,’ she said in thickly accented English, ‘they say that on some farms folk bury weapons and mark them as graves to disguise what’s there. They said they had to check.’

  ‘Oh, my God.’

  The woman just stared at her, eyes and soul empty. Claire looked at their guard, who turned his face away from them, hopefully in shame. She was in this deal for money but she did sympathise with the Boers, and hated the sight of men in uniform burning and looting a family’s possessions, defiling a child’s grave, to further the interests of an empire. Her father had been forced to flee Ireland because he had dared defy those who would oppress him and his people.

  The little girl started to cry and Claire picked her up and put her on her knee. She drew the child tightly to her breast and rocked her back and forth, moving with the swaying of the wagon. The guards were silent.

  ‘Your English is good,’ Claire said to the woman, as brightly as she could.

  ‘My mother was English. I’m glad she’s not alive to see all this. The funny thing of it is she didn’t approve of me marrying Gerrit.’

  ‘Is your husband . . . ?’

  ‘Alive? Yes. As far as I know. I pray he is. He’s on commando.’ She glared defiantly at the guard, who raised his head at the mention of Boer troops. ‘Are you married?’

  ‘No. Not any more, at least. I’m Claire, by the way.’

  ‘Gerda. Pardon me, but the way you are dressed, you look like you could be on commando as well.’

  ‘No, I’m just an innocent American citizen. A neutral,’ she said for the benefit of the guard. When he pretended not to be listening, by staring out the back of the wagon, Claire gave Gerda a conspiratorial wink. She was pleased to see the beginnings of a smile cross the young woman’s thin face.

  ‘If I were younger, without the children, I would be on the veld. They say there are women riding with the men,’ Gerda said.

  ‘So I’ve heard.’

  ‘If you are not married to a Boer, then why are they taking you to the camp as well?’

  Claire did not want to discuss her plight in front of the soldier, so she said, ‘I don’t know. I’m not part of this war.’

  ‘Everyone is part of this war.’ Gerda looked out the back of the wagon and stared at the smudge of smoke on the horizon, all that remained of her home and the resting place of her child. ‘You are in Africa, you are part of it.’

  *

  Claire smelled the camp before she saw it. The rank odour was a mixture of shit, urine, smoke and quicklime. She tried breathing through her mouth, but that hardly helped.

  ‘I have been dreading this day,’ Gerda said. She pulled her two children close to her and the little girl, whose name was Henriette, sensed her mother’s anxiety and started to cry.

  From what had happened to Wilma, Claire knew Gerda had good reason to be concerned, particularly for the wellbeing of her children. Kitchener had ordered his men to start burning farms and rounding up Boer women and children and the elderly in late 1900.

  They were called concentration camps. The theory was that by burning their farms and concentrating their women and children and elderly relations in camps, the Boer commandos would be robbed of their support network and forced to surrender. The commandos, however,
were adept at living off the land and the loss of their loved ones simply meant they had no reason to stay in one particular area or periodically return to check on their welfare.

  Just before they came to the camp itself Claire saw a woman standing in a field of fresh graves. Most of the dirt mounds, Claire realised with sudden horror, were too short to mark adult graves. This was a children’s cemetery. The woman stared listlessly at the new arrivals.

  Wooden framed gates latticed with barbed wire were swung open and the wagon creaked into the compound. Hundreds of bell tents, once white and now a rusty red from seasons of mud and dust, were lined up on the gently sloping hillside, which had been cleared of all natural shade. A couple of thin-looking women stopped their toil, carrying heavy buckets, to look vacantly at the new arrivals from below their bonnets.

  ‘Down from the wagons, if you please, ladies.’

  Claire looked down and saw a British Army captain reaching up a hand. The man was old for a subaltern – in his mid-forties by the look of him – and Claire wondered if he had been promoted from the ranks. He was hatless and his thinning black hair was stuck to his reddened scaly scalp with pomade. He was smiling, but the grin reminded Claire of a hyena waiting for its turn at a kill.

  ‘I can manage myself, thank you,’ Claire said, ignoring the man’s gesture.

  The captain grabbed hold of Gerda’s arm as she clambered down from the wagon, but she shook his hand off.

  ‘Now, now, ladies. No need to be so obstreperous,’ he said. ‘I’m Captain Davies, the second-in-command of the camp.’

  A grey-haired woman in a patched and stained pale-blue dress bustled up to the rear of the wagon. She said something in Afrikaans that made Gerda grin, but which Claire did not understand. Gerda answered back in the same language.

  ‘Forgive me, my dear. We don’t get many English here in the camp,’ the woman said to Claire in heavily accented English.

  ‘I’m not English.’

  ‘Oh, well, that’s all right then. Thank you, Captain, I am sure we will manage by ourselves from here. I’m Hilda,’ she said to Claire.

  ‘Claire.’

  The captain looked put out. He patted down an imaginary loose strand on his oily head, turned on his heel and marched off.

  ‘He likes to inspect the new ones,’ Hilda said to Claire once the captain was out of earshot. ‘Be careful around that one, my dear. He and a few of the Tommies from the army camp up the road think we are all so starved of men that we would lift our petticoats for even filthy swine like them. Unfortunately, they’re not always wrong in that belief – some of the young meisies here sneak out through gaps in the wire in the evenings to trade for food and medicines and other bits and pieces. Come with me, and I’ll show you to your tent.’

  Claire had looked again at the barbed-wire fence encircling the camp as they walked. It was tall – maybe twelve feet high – but she noted it was in a poor state of repair. Hilda had spoken about young girls slipping out, so it shouldn’t be too hard for her to find a means of escape.

  ‘Ag, the smell!’ Gerda said.

  ‘There are only ten toilets here for just over two thousand people,’ Hilda said, still speaking in English for Claire’s benefit as they walked.

  ‘My God,’ Claire said.

  ‘It was worse when I first got here, five – no, six months ago. The Tommies had dug us an open trench and placed a couple of planks across it. We’ve built outhouses, but there is always a shortage of timber and lime. The first facilities were badly sited, at the bottom of that slope – the ground is contaminated with filth and it rises up when the rains come.’

  ‘I see,’ Claire said.

  A bearded man, perhaps in his forties, passed them. He looked Claire up and down but Hilda pointedly ignored him.

  ‘Hensopper,’ Hilda said, then spat in the dirt. ‘Like “hands up”, you know? There are plenty of them here as well, the men who surrendered or who do not want to fight. The British keep them here where they are safer from our menfolk. They also try to pay the young women.’

  Claire looked about. There seemed to be few guards visible. ‘What about security, Hilda?’

  Hilda shrugged. ‘Not so much. The fence is full of holes and there are not too many soldiers here. Most of us have nowhere to go – our farms and crops were burned and our cattle stolen. Even if we wanted to run we have to eat, so most of us are just waiting here.’

  Hilda led them down a lane between rows of grubby tents. ‘It’s impossible to escape the dirt here and when it rains one is ankle-deep in mud and God knows what else. Over there is the hospital tent. You will see it all in there: cholera, dysentery, measles, smallpox. The diseases hit the children hardest. Many never leave that cursed tent.’

  Claire recalled the cemetery and the rows of tiny graves. Occasionally a woman would step out of a tent to check out the newcomers, or look up from her darning or washing, but mostly they were ignored. Claire thought of Wilma, and poor baby Piet, and now she could feel the fear and despair they must have experienced on entering such a place. Claire was determined to escape, and was still fit enough to do so, but it would break her heart leaving these women and children to their fates.

  ‘They say there are more than a hundred thousand of us already penned up like cattle across the country. I don’t know if that’s true.’ Hilda sidled closer to Claire, so that Gerda wouldn’t hear, and said, ‘But I do know it’s the little ones that are suffering the most. The measles epidemic claimed so many children last year; they were underfed and could not fight off the disease.’

  Claire nodded, again remembering little Piet.

  Gerda must have heard a little of what she said. She clutched her now sleeping daughter tight against her breast and drew her son closer to her. Claire felt a chill run down her spine. Disease was a hidden, foul enemy, from which there was little protection. She must get out of this place before it claimed her.

  Hilda spoke to Gerda in Afrikaans. To Claire, she said, ‘I told her to boil the children’s water. Though finding fuel to make a fire is one of our biggest challenges here.’

  Claire swatted at a buzzing swarm of blowflies that patrolled around her face. Between two tents a group of children were playing with something on the ground, prodding it with sticks. Claire stopped to take a look.

  ‘Ag, voetsek! Get away from that, you children,’ Hilda said. The children were prodding a snake – fortunately for them it appeared to be dead. They walked on. ‘Here’s your tent.’

  Hilda held a grubby canvas flap open and Claire stepped into the bell tent. It was hot and sticky inside and the canvas smelled of mildew. The twin odours of perspiration and urine also assailed her senses. A woman in her twenties – painfully thin like most of them in the camp – sat on a straw-filled mattress while she breastfed an infant. The baby, maybe six months old, should have been pudgy and cherubic by this time of its life. Instead, its limbs were skinny and limp. Its head seemed too large for its body and tiny ribs showed through stretched translucent skin. It was a boy, Claire thought, and his belly was obscenely distended.

  ‘Hello, I’m Claire,’ she said. The nursing woman looked up at her slowly, as if the mere gesture was draining her of strength. She half nodded and said nothing.

  ‘This is Kobie,’ Hilda said. ‘She shares the tent with her younger sister, Magrietta. Where is she, Kobie? Magrietta?’

  The woman simply shrugged.

  ‘Magrietta is young, just nineteen or twenty. She is quite a handful. Their father is on commando, a leader, and their mother, God rest her, passed away in January,’ Hilda explained. ‘I’ll leave you two to get acquainted. I’m going to put Gerda and the children in another tent. There’s a bed in the corner over there, and you’ll find a cup, bowl and a few other bits and pieces that may be of use. There’s quite a nice dress there, too. I was going to take it for myself today, but I think it might be more ap
propriate if you had another change of clothes.’

  Claire didn’t want to ask to whom the dress, bed, utensils and other odds and ends had belonged. She could guess that the former owner no longer needed them. ‘Thank you,’ she said. She waved goodbye to Gerda and the children.

  Kobie had removed her baby from her nipple and the infant had fallen into a fitful sleep lying across her belly. The young mother had just enough strength to re-button her blouse before she, too, nodded off.

  Claire moved to the tent flap and checked outside. No one was nearby. She closed the canvas again and took up the dead woman’s dress that had been left for her. It might once have been quite fashionable, but the bustle and trim had been picked off and the dress itself had been patched and darned in several places.

  She took off her riding boots and unbuttoned her trousers. She stripped off the pants and undergarments, as she would have to wash both, and then took off her shirt and camisole. Claire pulled the cotton dress over her head and gathered up her clothes in a pile. The dress felt cool against her bare skin and she found she enjoyed the sensation of not wearing any underclothes. Reluctantly, she pulled her riding boots on again. Now that she was inside the camp she felt less worried about being searched by a British soldier. It was time for her to retrieve Nathaniel’s map from its hiding place.

  Claire glanced across at Kobie again to make sure she was still asleep. She moved to a corner of the tent and squatted down on her haunches.

  ‘Verskoon my,’ said a female voice.

  Claire looked up, startled, as a young woman came in through the tent flap. Claire quickly removed her hand from under her dress. She felt her cheeks start to burn. ‘Um . . . forgive me. Sorry, I don’t speak Afrikaans.’

  ‘Verskoon . . . I mean, excuse me,’ the woman said. ‘But you are not permitted to make the toilet inside the tent.’

  ‘No, no. I wasn’t relieving myself, I was . . .’ Claire stammered.