Fire Across the Veldt

by John Wilcox

  ‘Where, pray, will you put the people you take from the farms?’ she asked.

  Kitchener had crossed one highly polished, booted leg over the other and had glared at her with those intimidating blue eyes. ‘They will be well looked after, madam, I assure you.’

  ‘Yes, General, looked after, but where and how? Clearly, women and children cannot be left on their own on the veldt to scratch a living from the land amidst the charred ruins of their farmsteads?’

  ‘Camps, madam. Camps. We are intending to concentrate them in camps, mostly near the railway lines, so that we can supply them easily.’

  Alice scribbled away. ‘Concentration camps, you say. Will they be allowed to move freely, coming and going, so to speak?’

  Kitchener cleared his throat. ‘Ah … not exactly. That would detract from the point of detaining them. They will be retained within wired compounds, in huts that we shall erect. But, I assure you, they will be well looked after.’

  Alice frowned and looked up. ‘What? You will put women and young children behind wire on the open veldt, with the rainy season coming on? Won’t this seem to be an overreaction? The great military fist, so to speak, crushing the Afrikaner civilian population?’

  The general’s countenance betrayed not a flicker of emotion. ‘Not at all. These people have been giving succour to their menfolk in the commandos who are raiding our lines of communications and our camps. The only way these Boers have been able to continue the fight out there on the plains is with the support of their families, giving them food, water and other comforts. We could not allow this to continue. It may be rough justice but it remains justice. People back home will understand that.’

  Alice sat forward. ‘Now let me get this clear. You intend to clear the veldt of these farms – a huge task, I would have thought, on its own. But surely this will free the men of the raiding commandos from any worry about their womenfolk and families back home. They will know that they are being fed and watered and this leaves them with even greater freedom to ride across this vast country, continuing the war that we were assured was now virtually over?’

  Kitchener remained unperturbed. ‘That may be so, but this will give us a counterbalancing freedom to hunt down these commandos, for they will be denied food, relief mounts and so on. They will have nowhere to go for such essential succour. We shall be on their tails, night and day, following them, outnumbering them and harassing them, until, eventually, each one will be cornered and either made to surrender or to stand and fight. We shall starve them out.’

  Alice shook her head slowly. ‘Cruel, General. Cruel. After all, they are only defending their country.’

  ‘You may put it like that, madam. Others would say that they are an arrogant, reactionary minority who have shown no leanings towards democracy in their governing and have, indeed, evidenced brutality to their black peoples. If it is cruel, then, I fear that war is always cruel. The majority of the Boers have already surrendered honourably and agreed terms with us. These raiders are now virtually stubborn outcasts who have only themselves to blame for the hardships they are imposing on their kith and kin.’

  Alice had left the general with a feeling that she had perhaps gone too far in criticising his strategy and even revealing that she was pro-Boer. A mistake, for journalists were supposed to be strictly objective – although most of them out here with the army, she had observed, were jingoistically supportive of the British Government and its policies in the field. Sitting now, sucking her pencil, she frowned at the thought that she might have compromised Simon’s position. After all, he was no longer an independent freelance only loosely attached to the army. He was now a serving officer, sworn to serve the Queen and obey the orders of his superiors. Damn! She really should have curbed her tongue.

  She applied herself once more to her story, going back over what she had written and making subtle alterations, painting Kitchener in a less doctrinaire light, making him seem more aware of the potential problems of housing the Boer families. Then, with a curse, she tore up the pages and rewrote again, quoting Kitchener directly and using her scribbled notes (oh, how she wished she had learnt shorthand!) to transcribe his exact words as best she could. She read what she had written with satisfaction. If this was going to get the general into trouble back home, then so be it. She must report what she had heard. On Kitchener’s head be it.

  She finished her story and then re-read it, to ensure that she had presented it in efficient cablese, for the Morning Post was careful with its money. Then she tucked it into her hand valise and walked out into the late evening sunshine.

  Almost immediately, she was accosted by a tall, casually dressed youngish man – perhaps in his early thirties – who doffed his wide-brimmed hat and half bowed. ‘Miss Griffith, is it not?’ he enquired.

  Alice inclined her head. ‘Yes?’

  ‘May I introduce myself. My name is James Fulton. I am a colleague. Like you, I have just arrived. I shall be covering for the Daily Mail.’

  Immediately, Alice regarded him with interest. The Mail had been launched only four years before by the Harmsworth brothers and had become an immediate, indeed sensational, success. Costing only a halfpenny, compared with the one penny charged by most other London dailies, it was now the first British newspaper to be printed simultaneously in both Manchester and London and its sales were now rumoured to have reached well over half a million copies. Lord Salisbury, the Tory prime minister, had condemned it as ‘a newspaper produced by office boys for office boys’ and it was unashamedly populist in tone, aiming for a readership of the newly literate lower middle-class market resulting from mass education, and setting out its stall with human interest stories, serials, features and competitions. But Alice cordially disliked it for its patriotic line on the Boer war, slavishly supporting the government’s policy. It was thunderously jingoistic. She held out her hand, then, to Fulton, with a degree of reserve.

  He took it and held it rather too long. ‘Delighted to meet you, Miss Griffith,’ he said. ‘I have been an admirer of yours for so long.’ His moustache was trimmed unfashionably to a thin line and his good teeth flashed as he smiled, looking up at her through his lashes as he bowed over her hand.

  ‘How kind,’ responded Alice distantly. The man was tall, with a handsome figure, accentuated by the white shirt opened sufficiently to show a suntanned chest and the beginnings of tightly curled hairs. His breeches were perhaps a little too tight and his hair, bleached by the sun, fell in waves to meet the side whiskers. He was, she concluded, far too handsome for his own good. Nevertheless, she felt a faint stirring of … what? Attraction? Certainly a feeling she had not experienced for many, many years. She shook her head in a tiny movement of self-disgust.

  ‘But you have Steevens reporting here, surely?’ She knew him to be one of the most experienced of the war correspondents.

  ‘Ah, you have not heard. He died, I’m afraid, during the siege of Ladysmith. That’s why I am here.’

  ‘Oh, I am so sorry. I had not heard. I don’t hunt with the pack, you see. I wondered why I had not met him. I respected him.’ Alice cleared her throat and withdrew her hand from his. ‘Tell me, Mr Fulton, have you … er … covered many other campaigns with the army?’

  ‘No, ma’am.’ He flashed his teeth again. ‘I am very much a new boy at this game, don’t you know. Until now, I have been trying to keep up with the Daily Mail’s passion for domestic crime, the strange doings of country clergymen and all that sort of thing.’ He clutched his hat to his heart as though to emphasise his veracity. ‘I am going to need all the help I can get out here, my dear Miss Griffith, so I do hope we can be friends.’ His eyes were of the softest brown, reminding her of Simon’s, although his eyelashes were longer. Much longer.

  ‘Of course, I like to be friends with all my colleagues. But we are all competitors, too, you know. You will find, Mr Fulton, that this is a very competitive … er … game. Yes, very competitive.’ She forced a smile. ‘But these days I am no th
reat to anyone. As you can see, I am now very much the eldest of the correspondents out here. Nothing more, really, than a middle-aged housewife.’

  Immediately, she cursed herself inwardly for sounding arch. Fulton pounced instantly on her false modesty.

  He reached out again for her hand, but she kept it to her side. ‘Well, ma’am,’ he said, ‘if I have to have a ruthless competitor, then I could only wish for one so charming and, may I say, beautiful – as well, of course, as skilful at the … er … game we play.’

  Alice blushed. ‘No, Mr Fulton,’ she said firmly, ‘no. You may not say that. Too many compliments, I fear. They are out of place here,’ she gestured at a platoon of infantry who marched by, rifles resting on their shoulders, ‘where we are reporting on death and misery. I wish you good day, sir.’

  She gave him a bobbed half curtsey and cursed herself again for accompanying it with a smile in return for his. He called after her, ‘Good day, Miss Griffith. I look forward to us meeting again soon.’

  ‘At the game we play…’ She mused on his words as she strode towards the censor’s office. He was clearly skilled at verbal dexterity and double entendre, particularly with the opposite sex. Oh dear! She shook her head as she walked. She did not wish to have an admirer on this campaign, it would all be too complicated, just too much damned trouble …!

  Alice Fonthill had never, of course, been unfaithful to her husband in thought or deed since their marriage. Nevertheless, she had always been aware that she retained her attractiveness to the opposite sex and, as a journalist, working in a strongly dominated male field, she had never shrunk from using her looks to extract information and to nail her story. But gratuitous flirting was not for her. She tossed her head. Particularly at her age – and with someone what, fifteen years younger? And yet Fulton was attractive, there was no doubt about that. Damned attractive. She found herself humming a little tune as she stepped forward to meet the pompous major.

  Some twenty miles away, on the southern fringe of Johannesburg, Simon was visiting his wounded troops in the field hospital when a message was handed to him. It stated that Lieutenant General French would like to see him immediately. He enquired of the orderly when the general had arrived and was informed that he had just disembarked from the train from Pretoria, having visited General Kitchener there on his arrival from the Cape Colony earlier in the day.

  Fonthill nodded and buttoned up his tunic, loosened at the collar to give some respite from the heat. French moved fast! As, indeed, was his reputation. Simon knew that the cavalryman was considered to be the up-and-coming man of the top command in South Africa. He and his bright young chief of staff, Major Douglas Haig, had been the last soldiers to escape from Ladysmith before the besieging cordon closed in. At forty-seven, just two years older than Fonthill, he now commanded a full division and had led five thousand horsemen, including mounted infantry, on that mad dash to take Kimberley – answering the ultimatum, it was whispered, of Cecil Rhodes, who had threatened to surrender the town to the surrounding Boers unless the freeing of his diamond mines were given top priority in the British army’s surge north.

  It was, then, with keen curiosity that Simon regarded the man sitting writing at a trestle table in a bell tent erected very near to the horse lines. It seemed that the cavalryman liked to be near his horses.

  French stood and beckoned him forward. He looked every inch a horseman. At just under medium height, he was thickset, with large jowls and a bull neck. His legs were bowed, almost in cartoon caricature of a cavalry general. He held out his hand to his visitor but his eyes did not smile.

  ‘Do sit, Fonthill.’ He gestured to a stool opposite the table. ‘I’ve read your report. Quite a skirmish you had out there.’

  ‘Yes, General.’ Simon deliberately refrained from offering a ‘sir’ at this stage in the conversation. He was anxious not to dilute his independence by appearing too submissive. ‘I wish I could have reported a more positive result, but I am happy to say that we just about had the better of it.’

  ‘Hmmm.’ French looked down at what was obviously Fonthill’s report. ‘Why did you allow yourself to be taken by surprise? You knew, I presume, that you were in Botha’s territory?’

  ‘Yes, that is why I posted vedettes out in front and on the flanks of the column. But Botha somehow slipped through or around them to attack.’

  French fixed him with a unblinking gaze, his pepper-and-salt moustache set in a grim line. ‘But you did not post proper vedettes. You sent out native scouts, when the situation surely demanded posting trained cavalrymen who knew what they were about. You cannot expect Kaffirs to do that sort of work.’

  Fonthill made a mental note. His report had only stated that he had posted scouts in the van and on the flanks. He had not mentioned the nationality of the vedettes. Someone must have informed French of the ethnicity of the men. Hammond …?

  ‘I must point out, General,’ he said, ‘that none of my men are fully trained yet. The purpose of the exercise was to train them. Under the circumstances I do feel that they comported themselves well. As for the natives, my experience both in the Transvaal War and when invading Matabeleland with Jamieson was that good native scouts were unparalleled in this sort of work. I have to confess that I do not know how they did not pick up Botha’s tracks on this occasion and I am currently investigating why this was so. But I do take your point, and my vedettes will be troopers in future.’

  ‘Very well.’ French’s features remained set in a faint scowl. He looked down again at the report and then back at Fonthill. ‘I see you allowed your warrant officer and chief scout to pursue game. Wasn’t this ill-advised, given, once again, that you were in Botha’s backyard, so to speak?’

  ‘In hindsight, possibly yes. But I have driven the men hard in training – we have been given very little time to get up to operational level – and this has involved living on hard tack when out on the veldt. I felt that fresh meat would be a well-deserved treat for them. If Sergeant Major Jenkins’s horse had not become injured and had to be put down, he would have only been away for less than ten minutes.’

  A silence fell on the two men as French’s gaze returned to the report and Fonthill studied the canvas roofing of the tent. Eventually, the general put down the paper and pushed it to one side.

  ‘I’m afraid that I have to say that you have not exactly made a good start, Fonthill,’ he said, his face remaining firmly set. ‘I do not regard the loss of nearly twenty per cent of your command as a fair price to pay for the damage you inflicted on the enemy.’

  Simon felt his temper rise and fought to remain in control. He was, after all, back in the bloody army …!

  ‘I am sorry that you feel that way, General. Forgive me if I don’t agree with you. My command was – and still is – fresh to battle and our training was not complete when we met up with a Boer commander who the world knows has already humiliated British forces considerably larger than his own. Nevertheless, we did, in fact, inflict greater damage on him than we sustained and he fled from the field. Knowing how few the Boer commandos are in number compared with the forces now pursuing them, I would suggest that their losses will have far more impact on them than mine will have on our numbers overall. I would like to add that I was proud of the way the men fought and have every confidence in them for the future.’

  Once again silence fell on the tent. But French’s expression softened a little. ‘Hmmm. How are your wounded coming along?’

  ‘Very well, thank you, sir.’ He conceded the title of respect as a concession to the general’s slight relaxation in attitude. ‘The surgeon reports that none of them is in danger. Would you care to visit them? I know the men would appreciate it.’

  ‘Ah … er … yes. I will make the rounds this evening. Shall we say 6 p.m.?’

  ‘Very good, sir.’

  ‘Fonthill …’

  ‘Sir?’

  An expression of something approaching embarrassment slipped for a moment over the general’s
features, then was replaced by his set-piece frown. ‘I am familiar, of course, with your record and reputation, both of which, ah, does you credit, of course.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘But … ah … you have not had experience, of course, of regimental command, since, indeed, you were a subaltern all those years ago – and then you would only have commanded at platoon level, no doubt.’

  ‘That is quite true.’

  ‘This war, as you know, is not at all over yet. We shall have much hard riding and hard fighting to do before we have cleared the country of these commandos, deploying as they do these guerrilla tactics and their knowledge of this vast and very unforgiving country. Do you … ah … consider yourself suited to command a column in the field, fighting in this very unconventional way? Eh, what?’

  Fonthill clenched his fists and drew in a deep breath. ‘It is quite true, General,’ he said, keeping his voice level, ‘that I lack experience of command in the field. But I do have considerable experience of warfare and of fighting quite unconventionally in many parts of the Empire over the last two decades. In fact, as I understand it, this was the very reason that General Kitchener invited me to come to South Africa to help in this new type of warfare.’ French opened his mouth to speak but Simon pressed on. ‘In fact, he led me to believe that I had more to offer than most line officers who, he felt, had already shown themselves to be rather constrained by tradition and … what shall I say … a regimented approach to fighting. “Playing the Boers at their own game”, I think was the phrase he used. If, however, you feel that, even at this early stage, I am not what you want in this campaign, then, of course, I must offer my resignation. Except that, of course, I must insist on submitting it to General Kitchener himself, since he commissioned me.’

  French held up a conciliatory hand. ‘No, no, Fonthill. I fear you misunderstood me. It has certainly not come to that.’ The general looked uncomfortable and shifted in his chair. ‘Ah, no. I merely wished to ensure that you have the confidence to continue. Which … er … clearly you have. And this is most important, of course, because I have work for you. Ah, yes, indeed.’