Ghosts of the Past

by Tony Park

  Peter dismounted. The man’s comrade dropped to the ground and crawled towards his friend.

  ‘Help me get him up on my horse,’ Peter said.

  The soldier was almost at the wounded man when another bullet brought up a fountain of earth near his hand. He stood, turned and ran towards where his own horse was rearing up, trying to break away from the man left to guard it. The fleeing man pitched forward as a round took him in the back, through his heart, killing him.

  Peter dropped to his knees next to the wounded man and unslung the canvas satchel full of medical supplies he kept on him. It had been severely depleted after the first attack. He ripped open the wounded soldier’s uniform tunic. A wheezing noise was coming from his chest and blood was frothing and bubbling around the bullet’s entry wound. Peter knew the man’s lung had been punctured and that there was little he could do for him. He figured that if he could make the hole airtight the man might at least be able to breathe more easily.

  ‘Shoot . . . shoot me, Doctor.’ The man coughed, his lips bright red. ‘Don’t let these savages finish me slowly.’

  Peter shook his head. He doubted the guerrillas firing on them could be more barbaric than men who deliberately shelled and machine-gunned civilian homes. He tried to think what he might use to seal the man’s punctured lung. Ideally it would be something waterproof, but flexible.

  His coat. He took the hunting knife he wore on his belt, lifted the hem of his sailor’s overcoat and cut away a square patch. He rinsed the wound and the material with water from his canteen and then placed the material over the wound. Immediately, the gurgling stopped and the lung seemed to draw the oilskin in against the wound, sealing it. Peter secured it with a bandage around the man’s torso and tied it off.

  Around him, Schutztruppen were either running to get their horses, firing up at the hillside, or coming back past him, once more on their mounts. He called to a man still on foot. ‘Come, help me.’

  The man obeyed and together they lifted the soldier who had been shot in the chest. They walked with him, supporting him under his shoulders, and were nearly at Peter’s horse when the man between them shuddered and pitched forward, dead.

  Peter turned, drew his pistol again and fired blindly up the hills. How could they shoot a wounded man in the back?

  *

  Blake worked the bolt on his Lee Enfield, chambering another round. He called to Morengo. ‘Tell your men to stop aiming for the wounded.’

  ‘They would have massacred our women and children if they had still been there.’

  Blake nodded. ‘I know. But look at it this way. If you wound a man it takes two others to get him off the battlefield. You’re tying up more Germans by wounding them rather than killing them.’

  Morengo gave the order in Afrikaans, the common language of his band.

  Blake took aim at a man on a horse who was waving a hand around, an officer probably. He breathed in, then out halfway, and squeezed the trigger. The man’s horse reared up at another sound or shot and the officer was jerked out of the line of fire. Blake felt nothing, not disappointment at missing, nor relief; this was just a job. It was funny and scary how easily he had settled back into the business of hunting and killing. He worked the bolt again.

  The Germans were getting organised below, most of the Schutztruppen now back on their horses, their officers trying to find a path up the hills to get to the rebels.

  They would fail. Morengo had used his unparalleled knowledge of these barren hills to execute the plan he and Blake had agreed upon. Most of the women and children had been evacuated the night before. With their belongings piled onto donkeys they had left under the cover of darkness, making their way up steep, winding paths that were barely visible even in daylight. They were a mile away now, making their way along a shadowed ravine en route to a new location.

  To make it look like the kraal was still fully inhabited they had lit cooking fires at nearly all of the huts before dawn. A few people, those too infirm to move swiftly by night, had agreed to stay. The ruse had worked and, as Morengo had predicted, the Germans had wasted precious shells and bullets destroying empty homes. Some of the civilians had been killed, either by artillery fire or, to Blake’s disgust, by Schutztruppen who had dragged them from their huts and executed them on the spot. Blake hadn’t believed the worst of what Kaptein Morengo had told him, but now it appeared it was true. It was also true that he’d had enough of war and had been reluctant to join this struggle, but it would have been harder for him to ride away now that he had seen for himself what the Nama were up against.

  The time it had taken the Germans to sweep the plateau had allowed the fleeing civilians to move further out of reach.

  Blake took aim at a running soldier, felt the kick of the rifle in his shoulder, and saw the man fall. He looked for a new target and saw movement on the firing line; the mountain guns were too far away for his rifle, but he could see that the artillery pieces were being adjusted. ‘They’re aiming at us.’

  Morengo nodded. ‘As we knew they would. Prepare to move, men!’

  Blake slid backwards on his belly, over the loose rocks that were warming with the sun’s ascent. Just before he lost sight of the guns he saw the first puff of smoke from a barrel and heard the screech of an incoming shell. The projectile detonated just below the edge of the cliff and sent up a fountain of red-hot shrapnel. Dislodged rocks rained down around Blake and he put his free hand over the back of his head as he was peppered with dirt.

  On either side of him rebels were making their way to their horses. The German gunners adjusted their fire and two shells from the next salvo detonated on Blake’s side of the ridgeline. A man he had just seen running disappeared, obliterated by the explosion of steel and fire. A horse rolled on the ground.

  ‘Come,’ Morengo said to him.

  ‘Where’s Liesl?’ Blake asked. The last time he had seen her, in the pre-dawn darkness as Morengo had issued his final orders, she had been assigned the duty of caring for the Nama’s horses in preparation for them falling back from the ridgeline.

  Morengo took his horse’s reins from a small boy. He hoisted himself up into the saddle. ‘I don’t know, but she passes for a grown woman these days.’

  Blake took control of his horse and addressed the boy. ‘Where is Liesl?’

  The boy nodded his head towards the plateau they had been overlooking. ‘She told me to take the horses because she was going down to be with the old people in the camp.’

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Blake said. He leapt up onto his horse, spurred it and rode off, in the opposite direction to Morengo and the others.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Jakob called.

  ‘To find your niece.’

  Blake didn’t wait to hear Jakob’s reply, concentrating instead on the narrow path that led down a winding route to the plateau. He had to be careful, as he knew that if the Germans saw him coming they would work out the route up to where the rebels had been lying, and their Boer outriders might be able to negotiate the trail and come after them. Morengo’s success now depended on his being able to make a clean break from the Germans.

  Blake went about halfway down to the plateau then stopped and dismounted behind a large boulder. He tethered the horse’s reins to a gnarled tree that grew from a crevice. He took his rifle and crept lower.

  From here he could see the smoking ruins of the huts and the chaos of the Germans as they tried to regroup and pursue Morengo and his men.

  Blake heard rifle shots and took out his binoculars from the leather pouch hanging from a strap across his body. He saw two Schutztruppen, standing and firing, and when he followed their line of fire he saw a lithe figure running. She was in pants and a broad-brimmed hat, but Blake recognised Liesl immediately. She was carrying a child, a boy of nine or ten by the look of it, on her back. Blake saw the red stain his wounded foot was making on Liesl’s buckski
n coat.

  Blake chambered a round and rested his Lee Enfield in the cleft of two rocks, taking aim at the soldier on the right. He breathed and squeezed and the man fell. His comrade dropped to one knee, half hidden by a mat house. Blake worked the bolt and fired again through the flimsy wall, but couldn’t tell if he had hit him or not.

  Of more concern was a man on horseback, who had clearly also seen Liesl’s flight and looked to have decided to ride her down. The man had his rifle over his shoulder, but as he galloped towards her he drew his long bayonet from its scabbard with the hand not holding the reins and held it up, pointing forward like a cavalry sword.

  Blake aimed for him, fired, but missed. Hitting a moving target, especially one on horseback, was never easy.

  The rider swivelled his head, looking for where the shot had come from, but unable to see the danger, he carried on. He was rapidly closing the distance between him and Liesl. Blake led the man, aiming ahead of the horse, knowing that he needed to allow for the speed of the animal and the distance it would cover before the bullet reached its target.

  The rider was almost on Liesl and the boy and it looked like he was aiming to skewer her through the child’s back. Blake saw the grim fury in the man’s face as he fired.

  The horse’s breath must have been on the boy’s back when the man toppled from the saddle. The horse carried on past the fleeing girl and the child, the dead man hanging from one stirrup, his head and body bouncing over the mercilessly rocky ground. Blake saw Liesl’s mouth open wide in horror.

  Blake stood and hopped from rock to rock, coming lower so that he might meet Liesl, who was less than a hundred metres away from him now. There were another two men on horses following the dead rider, but Blake knew he would get to her first, as long as Liesl kept up her pace.

  One of the men on horseback fired a wild shot which missed, but Liesl instinctively glanced over her shoulder to see where the danger was coming from, and fell.

  Blake swore.

  The fall cost Liesl her lead. The little boy screamed in pain as he was catapulted off her. Blake looked at the distance between them and it could have been a hundred miles for all the good it would do him. He brought his rifle up and aimed at the man closest behind Liesl. The rider was coming straight at him from this angle, so there was no need for him to aim off, but just as he was about to pull the trigger Liesl scrambled to her feet and blocked Blake’s view of man and horse.

  He held his fire, but kept his aim steady, ready to pull the trigger as soon as he got a clear shot at this man, or the one riding up immediately behind him.

  Blake wanted to scream at Liesl to get out of the way, but he was sure she wouldn’t hear him over the drum of the horse’s hooves. She turned to face the riders and shepherded the boy behind her, to shield him from the oncoming fury.

  Courage, Blake thought.

  He could see that the man in the saddle, probably an officer, had a pistol out, and Blake gritted his teeth, dreading the worst. So help him, if this man shot an unarmed girl dead in cold blood Blake would die trying to kill him.

  Liesl reached up with one hand and Blake thought it might be the death of her, but she pulled off her hat and her long hair cascaded down. The German officer pulled up, dust obscuring Liesl and the boy for a second. When it settled Blake saw that the man had dismounted and was pointing his pistol at the fugitives. He seemed, from what Blake could see, to be laughing at something, perhaps Liesl’s clever ploy to show she was a woman.

  The German’s hat had fallen off, Blake saw, and he had blond curly hair and a uniform that was different from the normal Schutztruppe brown. The tunic under his open oilskin coat had green facings and Blake knew that the man was Landespolizei, a volunteer police officer. He tousled the boy’s hair, and though the lad recoiled from the touch, the officer appeared to pose them no immediate harm.

  Nevertheless Blake took aim at the officer, but he was thwarted again when Liesl once more unknowingly stepped in the way of his shot. By this time the other rider had arrived, and two more were cantering up. Blake hoped they might let Liesl go, but another officer arrived, Schutztruppe this time, and gave orders to one of the troopers, who dismounted, fetched some rope from his saddlebag and tied Liesl and the boy’s hands.

  There was nothing more Blake could do – he was outnumbered. He retraced his path through the boulders back to where his horse was tied. He climbed into the saddle, grabbed the reins tight and set off to catch up with Morengo and the others.

  Blake consoled himself with the fact that Liesl had not been shot on sight – clearly not all Germans were as evil as Morengo made them out to be. However, he was not sure she was out of trouble. She was young and pretty and Blake feared what a bunch of lonely soldiers far from wives and sweethearts and the orderliness of their European home might do once they took a good look at her. Even if she were not raped en route she would be taken to one of the camps that people spoke of, where she would be worked to death.

  He was not prepared to forget about Liesl, but he had to trust Morengo and the strategy they had worked out together. Their plan was to draw the Germans deeper into the mountains, exhaust them, and eventually ‘disappear’. When the northern column turned home for Keetmanshoop the rebels would fall upon it from the rear. Blake hoped Liesl could stay safe until he and Morengo came after the column. He would make it his business to rescue her when they did.

  He spurred his horse on over a rise and in the distance caught a glimpse of the last of Morengo’s men disappearing into a rocky gully that he might not have been able to find if he’d been a minute later.

  The Black Napoleon was about to lead his colonial masters on a dance of death.

  Chapter 38

  Karas Mountains, Namibia, the present day

  Anja lowered her iPad. ‘My battery is nearly dead.’

  Nick contemplated the barren plateau below them. He tried to imagine shells bursting, machine guns firing and wily rebel horsemen disappearing along hidden trails. Namibia today was empty and peaceful; it was almost impossible to imagine the country at war, but of course it had been during the latter years of the twentieth century, in an equally bloody struggle for independence.

  For now there was silence.

  ‘Do you know much about this Dr Peter Kohl?’ Nick asked, after a while.

  ‘Yes. He has been part of my research for some time. He and his first wife, Claire Martin, bred horses, as well as owning three cattle farms, though it seems most of their horses went to the war effort. After the conflict was over he went back to breeding horses. One theory is that the desert horses are descended from his stock, that he let them loose when South African troops fighting on the British side invaded German South West Africa in 1915, in the early days of the First World War.’

  ‘Just before Dr Kohl ended up in the British prisoner of war camp.’

  ‘Yes,’ Anja said.

  ‘And we know from the start of his manuscript that Claire died just before Blake.’

  ‘Yes. The same month, September.’

  ‘So not long after the battle you were just reading about, at Narudas,’ Nick said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Kohl says she drowned at sea – the coast is a long way from here,’ Nick said.

  Anja nodded. ‘Yes. I found an old item from a newspaper from 1907 that confirms this, where Dr Peter Kohl had announced his wife was still missing, presumed dead, after falling overboard from a passenger vessel that left Lüderitz in September 1906, two days before Blake was killed. I wonder if she was trying to get away from the colony, maybe with some of her gold? Kohl says she was waiting with a boat for Blake. I wonder what they had planned.’

  ‘Me too,’ Anja agreed. ‘It’s one more mystery I hope his papers clear up. Anyway, where to next? We can go to Aus, if you like, where I stay. I need to charge up my iPad at least. Also, I have skimmed ahead in the manuscript, looki
ng for places I’m interested in. There are several mentions of Aus and Lüderitz. We’ll be heading in the right direction, and Lüderitz was the home of one of the most infamous places in Namibian history, the concentration camp at Shark Island, sometimes referred to as Death Island.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound good.’

  ‘No,’ Anja said. ‘It’s not known how many Nama and Herero internees died there, but some estimates put the figure at three thousand. It’s not a big island, only about forty hectares and joined to the mainland by a causeway built during the war, but it was a terrible place, exposed to the rain and winds off the Atlantic. People died of typhoid and scurvy or they were worked to death.’

  ‘I’m in your hands from now on, as to where we should go.’

  They got in their cars and Nick followed Anja out to the M26 gravel road and the B1, which took them via the town of Keetmanshoop. Nick imagined the German Schutztruppe column more than a hundred years earlier, men, cannons and machine guns, trudging down this same route, then just a dusty track, on their way to the Karasberge. Anja called Nick on his phone as they approached the town and told him she needed to stop for fuel.

  The town was low-rise, utilitarian, a place for farmers to shop for essentials and locals to get business done. It was much smaller than Upington and less prosperous.

  A warm wind coated the town in dust as they filled up at a service station. Nick bought Cokes for both of them in the shop and tried his best to politely deter one young man who was begging and another who was insisting he clean Nick’s car. Anja ignored them when they came to her.

  ‘The Nama are marginalised,’ she said as she leaned against his car, drinking her cola while his car was filled. ‘The government is dominated by Ovambo, a tribe which was not much involved with the colonial war against the Germans. The Ovambo played a major role in the fight for Namibia’s independence, which put them in power, and while they pay lip service to the role the Nama played in the uprising – their most famous commander, Hendrik Witbooi, is on the Namibian hundred-dollar note – the Nama people feel as though they are at the end of the queue for government funding and infrastructure.’