Blunted Lance

by Max Hennessy

  ‘I have taken over half the hotel,’ Crawford said. ‘I have two or three rooms upstairs for my own use and this room for my staff. There are a few things I have to clear up but I presume you will not be wanting me to move out at once.’

  General Goff frowned. ‘Regretfully,’ he said, ‘I shall. I propose to start work immediately and I shall need every inch of space I can find.’

  ‘I can arrange for my marquee to be placed at your disposal.’

  ‘I prefer to be here near the telegraph.’

  Crawford’s mouth tightened. ‘It will take time to tie up the loose ends.’

  ‘I trust not.’

  Crawford stared back at the General, hatred in his eyes. His throat worked then he nodded slowly.

  General Crawford had disappeared by next morning. He had found it possible to tie up his loose ends a great deal more quickly than he had anticipated and had departed in the early hours for Cape Town and a ship home.

  During the morning, General Goff called his officers into the billiard room of the hotel and informed them that they were moving towards Jacobspoort at once. There were a few sidelong glances and he decided it needed explanation.

  ‘We’re here to chivvy Brother Boer into attacking us,’ he pointed out. ‘So that the army in front of Ladysmith will be relieved of pressure. But attacking us doesn’t mean defeating us and if he won’t attack us, then we shall attack him.’ He studied the faces of his officers, startled to see how young most of them seemed. ‘It’s my responsibility to lead this column, but first I want to see it brought up to scratch. This is a time of great emergency. There are people in Ladysmith waiting for relief and it’s our job to see that it becomes possible. I expect everybody to pull his weight and I shall accept no excuses.’

  He had considered appealing to their loyalty but had decided in the end that a threat might be better. Crawford had clearly let them get away with murder and it was as well to let them know that from now on they were not going to. Chrissie Crawford was out and Balaclava Bill was in control.

  Crawford’s troops were a mixed lot and the whole column had grown used to easy methods and too much comfort, while the wagonloads of tents were like a red rag to a bull to the General.

  ‘Trim,’ he snapped at the aide, ‘did you find out how many wagons are occupied by tents alone?’

  ‘Sir!’ Trim produced a paper which he laid in front of the General. ‘The number of wagons, sir. Also the speed of the advance.’

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘A report, sir.’

  ‘I didn’t ask for a report, damn it! I asked you to find out.’

  ‘It’s in the report, sir.’

  ‘Well, that’s something. But in future don’t waste your time on bits of paper. They clutter the place up.’

  ‘Sir.’

  The General turned to Ellesmere. ‘These damn tents irritate me, Ned,’ he said. ‘There are too many of them. From now on they’ll be discarded. Fortunately, in this country even if it rains, when the sun comes out it’s hot enough to dry everything at once.’

  Trim looked worried. ‘Normally, sir,’ he said, ‘they’re only discarded when operations are continuous from day to day.’

  The General turned to him. ‘That’s what they will be, my boy. The troops will learn to sleep under the stars.’

  Trim was aghast. ‘They won’t like it, sir.’

  ‘Then they’ll have to lump it.’

  ‘What about officers, sir? They can hardly sleep in tents if the men don’t.’

  ‘Exactly. They too will sleep in the open.’

  Trim looked shocked. ‘Where will they store their baggage, sir?’

  The General smiled maliciously. ‘They won’t have any baggage, Trim. What did we manage with in Zululand, Ned?’

  ‘Forty pounds, sir.’

  ‘Then forty pounds is what it will be here. The rest will be left with the tents.’ He beamed at Trim. ‘Think how much everybody will enjoy it when we stop moving.’

  ‘Sir, I feel—’

  The General’s eyes flashed. ‘I advise you to keep your feelings to yourself, my boy,’ he said. ‘A general and a column commander is the nearest thing in that column to God, and it’s only a man who wishes to commit professional suicide who argues with him. I am not God, and you’re not the Archangel Gabriel, but you will not dispute my orders.’

  Within an hour, the headquarters tent was set up on the scrubby land beyond the group of iron buildings round the station, where the telegraph office was situated. General Goff had a strong suspicion that a great deal of information was being disseminated to the Boers by the bearded backvelders he had seen in the bar of the hotel, and he preferred to have his headquarters where they couldn’t pick up titbits of gossip.

  It was surrounded by a group of other tents, everything about them khaki because the land and everything on it – the sage bushes, the aloes and acacia thorns, the uniforms – were khaki, too. Even the faces – of both black and white men – were khaki from the dust that lifted every time a foot stirred.

  As soon as the tents were in place and a table set down, while the unwitting troops enjoyed their last day of the comfort they had grown used to under General Crawford, General Goff called for regimental returns, the lists of sick and military crimes, and began to frown over interminable reports and telegrams, detailing the tent wagons for food and ammunition and demanding more horses and fresh stores. Officers’ mounts were detached from the wooden hitching rail outside the hotel and tied instead to the rail alongside the railway track, and within twenty-four hours the place had acquired a permanent look, with geraniums planted in old paraffin tins to give a touch of colour to the bleak brown aspect.

  Trains began to arrive bringing new stores, frightened horses, half-dead after the journey from the coast, crates of ammunition, boxes of beef, sacks of flour, blankets, bales of compressed fodder for the horses, mealies for the African drivers and grooms, hospital stores and equipment, all trundled in mule carts or sixteen-span teams of oxen to the depot. Occasionally a rider appeared in the distance, dragging with him a cloud of dust that lifted from the veldt like steam, a miasmic figure in the heat and shimmery as a spectre, until he disappeared into a fold in the ground and reappeared a moment later as a messenger from one of the outlying wings of the force. Artillery came up under double teams and fresh infantry arrived from the Cape, weighed down under their webbing, rolled greatcoats, water bottles, Lee Metford rifles and full haversacks, and bulging with the extra rounds in their cartridge pouches. They had travelled in open cattle trucks and were spilled on to the veldt alongside the railway line, bewildered, hot and exhausted.

  ‘They’ll do,’ the General said, eyeing them shrewdly. ‘The junior officers will suffer from the usual stage fright and get into difficulties, I expect, but when the veneer of peace has gone they’ll more often than not get out of them. It only requires the spit and polish to go, for the brain to become unglued.’ He beamed at Ellesmere. ‘It may not be a great war, Ned, but I have a feeling it’s going to be a wonderful military spring cleaning.’

  His preliminary arrangements made, the General called for his horse and began to ride round the different units of his command.

  Morby-Smith, with the 19th Lancers, was delighted to see him. ‘I couldn’t believe my ears, sir, when I learned it was you,’ he said. ‘You’re just what we need.’

  ‘See you measure up to it then,’ the General growled. ‘Because you’re carrying too much equipment for a start. Half of it’s got to go. Horses will be hobbled from now on. And we’re no longer drilling for the charge; and the fit of a jacket, the possession of a good seat or a good pair of hands are no longer as important as field craft. And from now on, your job will not be to protect my headquarters. It’ll be to find out where Brother Boer’s are. How are my sons?’

  ‘Doing well, si
r. Losby, of B Squadron, went sick and Robert’s running it. He’s a stickler for detail.’

  Robert, the General decided, sounded as though he were a fusspot and Morby-Smith didn’t wish to say so.

  ‘And young Dabney?’

  ‘Splendid, sir.’ Morby-Smith’s reaction was different this time. ‘He was clearly chafing as a squadron officer, so I tried him on his own. He’s a natural scout, sir, and I persuaded General Crawford to give him a small column of North Cape Horse. He seemed to be doing very well but General Crawford preferred his people close at hand and he was returned to the Regiment.’

  The North Cape Horse were next on the list. Composed of farmers and countrymen from the area round Hoeptown, they had done well under the General in Zululand. They were a rough and ready lot and their ponies were shaggy, unlike the sleek mounts of the Lancers, while their equipment consisted only of a rifle, a bandoleer of ammunition, a blanket, a poncho and a saddlebag full of biltong. They were led by Commandant Burger’s son, Meyer, and as scouts they were unbeatable.

  ‘You’ll be the eyes of the column,’ the General informed Burger. ‘And I shall make a point of seeing that a few of the Lancers are attached to you to learn the tricks of the trade.’

  The word flew round quickly as the General stalked through cookhouse areas, shocked at the lackadaisical methods, and, watched by nervous officers, blistered a few NCOs with his tongue. Service Corps horses were inspected meticulously and officers were informed acidly that this was a mounted war and it wouldn’t be won with them in the condition in which he found them. Sergeant-majors were snapped at and veterinary surgeons informed in no uncertain terms that they weren’t there merely to hand out horse pills.

  Colonels were called to headquarters and told that from now on when the column moved it would move faster, and that when it manoeuvred, it would manoeuvre with a speed it had failed to show when it had been caught on the veldt by De Hoog. The artillery was told to be smarter at their drill. The balloon aeronauts were informed that they were expected to be aloft, not on their backsides on the ground. The 19th Lancers were informed that lances would not win the war because ten to one the Boers would probably never permit them to get close enough to use them, and that therefore they had better make sure that their practice with rifles was also good. The North Cape Horse were informed that, volunteers though they were, they were not expected to behave as if they were on a picnic. The infantry battalions were left in no doubt that they were in need of pulling together and one of the colonels was hurriedly removed from office.

  There was a great deal more discomfort than there had been under General Crawford but there was also suddenly a great deal more efficiency and even Trim’s disapproving look had vanished. It seemed to be time to advance on Jacobspoort to show De Hoog what they were made of.

  It was Dabney who brought in the information on the Boers’ whereabouts. Since he had flung General Crawford back, Martinius De Hoog seemed to have disappeared and the need was for news.

  From the 19th Lancers General Goff requested Dabney and a detachment of the best riders, horsemasters and shots for a scouting column. To them he added a squadron of the North Cape Horse which included men who had been raised in the area and knew the country. He was pleased to see their look of efficiency but was startled when Sergeant Ackroyd announced that he wished to go with them.

  ‘Great God in the Mountains, Ellis,’ the General said. ‘What’s my son got that I haven’t got?’

  ‘Mr Dabney moves fast, sir. I’d like to be with him.’

  The General’s eyebrows lifted but he was pleased.

  Looking for drifts over the Koro River by which the main force could cross, Dabney’s little column worked its way north of Bester’s Nek. With them were a group of Bantus known to everyone as The Black Watch, and they lay up in clumps of mimosa during the day and only moved at night. Several times Boer patrols appeared near them and on one occasion they were obliged to bolt, with one man killed and one wounded.

  The Boers had moved fast and seemed invisible, but the whole veldt spoke of their presence. The very air was full of suspense for the outbreak of firing, and every clod of earth was an enemy. Plodding on in silence, scouts out in front, at least they were certain that in this barren plain an ambush was impossible. After another mile, Dabney signalled for a halt to look round the horses, then they mounted again and pressed on. The horses were beginning to sweat now and after a while he ordered another pause to check for trouble. A loosened girth was found, and a galling surcingle, then they were off again.

  As they disappeared in a fold of the plain, dust clogging their mouths, the horses lathering, Dabney’s self-confidence was supreme. He knew he was good at the job in a way that the more conventional officers of the 19th never would be, and he had absorbed everything his father had ever said or written, while the time he had spent in South Africa had cleared his mind of the stiffness of European training. He was self-reliant and more insubordinate than his brother officers, and, unlike them, knew that to keep a good, sleek, hard-riding pony you needed to be expert, among other things, at stealing oats. He had watched his Kaffirs treat wounds with cow dung and, on the occasion when they had been fired on, had seen the surgeon faint when the Kaffirs had removed their foul covering from the wounded man’s injury. His men were a tough, self-reliant lot, some South African, speaking Kaffir and the Afrikaner ‘taal’, some Australian and New Zealand, some British. They were lean, dusty men, their only real uniform the pink puggaree they wore round their slouch hats, and among their weapons were a few long-range Mausers captured from the Boers.

  The country fascinated and repelled him at the same time. Hot, sandy, stony and desolate, yet fertile where there was water, it was like a drowsy, yellow-grey monster, dry and scaly, warted here and there with taibosch or prickly pear, or with aloes sticking up like bayonets. Most of the time it was a dust heap covered with flat stones, still and silent, a gauze of purple clinging to the distance and melting away in the sun. The sunsets were awe-inspiring and night came suddenly like a purple curtain pulled across a window, the sun sinking in a golden-green haze shot with crimson and azure. Dawn came with equal speed, the first gleam followed by a saffron glow that edged out of the violet shadows until the hills stood out black against the horizon. As the clouds became edged with gold, they gradually vanished into rosy wisps that dispersed in the brightening sky, and as the stars disappeared beams of light struck upwards and the sun began to flood the plain with day.

  It was a mounted man’s country and he had learned how to look after his mount. British officers had always prided themselves on their horsemastership but he had found, in fact, that they knew next to nothing. Riding horses in England had not meant looking after them, and those who rode at home invariably had grooms to care for their mounts. Looking wise as a hand was run over a fetlock did not make a man an expert but his father had always insisted on his family caring for their own horses and even Robert, who claimed to hate them, knew how to look after them. The General himself knew more about them than any man Dabney knew and once, when the vet had been unable to get rid of mange in a pony, he had seen him do it with a mixture that consisted chiefly of ointment prescribed for lice.

  Picking up the trail of horses near a range of hills known as the Kwathambas, a rocky group laying in a long featureless hog’s back terraced by erosion and strewn with red rock, aloes and acacia thorn, among the dusty hoof prints he found the tracks of guns which seemed to confirm that the trail was De Hoog’s. Moving forward with nothing but an outlying patrol, he picked up the tracks again just to the south of the hills, and, leaving his men well back out of sight crouching round the fires they had built of dung and the thorn scrub that filled the air with the aromatic smell of acacia, he moved forward at dusk with only Ellis Ackroyd and a man to hold the horses. Hiding themselves in a patch of scrub, they lay down, stiff with cold despite the heat of the day, and waited for da
wn. They were across the route where Crawford had been surprised some time before, and in the first light of the new day saw the grave of a British officer nearby, a crude cross with a name burned on it with a heated bayonet, and a pair of feet, disturbed by prowling animals, protruding from the soil.

  ‘There are men on top of them hills, sir,’ Ackroyd said quietly, peering through Dabney’s binoculars. ‘That means we’ll have to climb the slopes as usual to dislodge ’em.’

  The day was still only a faint promise of gold in the east and it was a pure morning with all the world still and the air invigorating, the early sun turning the rust-coloured peaks of the hills into pink battlements. Africa seemed empty, bare and rolling, and covered with thin brown grass dried by the sun. The ridge in front rose slantwise, rough-edged like a saw where small outcrops of rocks broke through the surface and edged the skyline.

  Just behind them their ponies snorted softly, Ackroyd’s nuzzling at the dried blood on a foreleg where it had cut it the night before climbing out of a donga. The plain was covered with a thick milky mist that lay like a blanket several feet deep above the ground, above it the ghostly tops of a few trees. After a while they spotted buck, dim ghostly shapes suspended against an invisible background, bodies without legs, heads without bodies; then as they watched, twenty or thirty horned heads shot up where they had originally seen only two or three. Finally, as the mist shifted, they saw the whole herd.

  A moment later, as a frightened covey of thickhead birds rose in a clatter of wings, like drops of bright water flung against a stone the buck split apart, swung together like iron filings drawn to a magnet, then began to race across the veldt, sweeping away in a strung-out cloud, a whirlpool of racing shapes, the sun catching the black and white stripes on their tawny sides so that they seemed like a stream running across the empty plain. Over the silence they heard the faint sound of Dopper hymns coming from the base of the hills.