Fire Across the Veldt

by John Wilcox

  Then they dismounted and, taking their rifles from the saddle buckets, left their horses in the little churchyard, one man each looking after four horses. Treading softly, the remainder of the troop walked down Kerk Street in single file, Fonthill leading.

  Just before the crossroads, he held up his hand and waved for his men to fall back into the little gardens that fronted the houses while he crept forward. From behind a stunted tree he scanned the house. He could only see two guards on the stoep and one of them seemed asleep – typical! However, there were probably more at the back.

  He turned to Hammond and Jenkins who crouched behind him now. ‘Right,’ he whispered. ‘We will go in on the run. Pass the word to fan out around the house. I can’t see any horses but they might be at the back. I will approach from the front. Hammond, you take a section and double round the back. Ignore any firing. Just make for the back. I don’t want anyone to escape. Now, pass the word and we will go in in exactly three minutes from now.’

  Fonthill withdrew his revolver from its holster – his arm was still too sore to carry and use a rifle and bayonet – and took out his Hunter watch. After three minutes, he looked behind him. Hammond had fallen back and was waiting with a section he had selected some twenty yards or so towards the rear. But Jenkins and eager faces were waiting just behind him. He raised an arm, held it aloft for a moment and then pointed forwards, breaking into a run as he did so.

  He was conscious that troopers were fanning out on either side of him and Jenkins and he were halfway across the crossroads when one of the guards on the stoep shouted, raised his rifle and fired. The bullet hit the ground at his feet and pinged away. Immediately, Jenkins fired his rifle from the hip, and suddenly a stuttering fire broke out from the veranda and from two other places in the little garden that fringed the stoep. But it was all too late. The lead troopers halted for a moment, knelt and let out a ragged volley which brought down the two men clearly visible on the veranda and brought moans from behind bushes in the garden.

  Then Fonthill and Jenkins were on the stoep and crashing through the door which led into a lounge. The room seemed to be full of men in various stages of undress who were scrambling on the floor, some of them reaching for rifles and revolvers. Simon fired one shot above their heads.

  ‘Don’t think of firing!’ he shouted. ‘The house is surrounded and you will all be killed. Don’t touch your weapons.’ He was conscious of troopers crowding into the room behind him. ‘Jenkins.’

  ‘Sir!’

  ‘Take five men and go through the other rooms quickly.’

  The Welshman ran towards the nearest door and crashed it open with his rifle butt before running through it, followed by several men.

  Fonthill was conscious of firing coming from the rear of the house and was immediately anxious for Jenkins until he realised that the shots were coming from outside the house. He pushed the muzzle of his revolver under the chin of the nearest Boer. ‘Where is the president?’ he demanded.

  The man just shook his head, his eyes wide.

  ‘General de Wet?’

  That brought the same response. Then the man grinned, a most unexpected response, and nodded towards the window. Fonthill turned and saw an elderly man on horseback, in his nightshirt and with beard flowing behind him, galloping away down the street. A trooper ran after him, knelt and fired several times but the horseman disappeared into the darkness.

  Simon swung back to the Boer. ‘The president?’ he asked.

  The Boer nodded. ‘Ja,’ he said in a low growl. ‘He always rides in his nightshirt.’ Then he grinned again.

  Fonthill shook his head and caught the man’s eye. He couldn’t help grinning in turn. ‘Ah well,’ he said. ‘I just hope your president doesn’t catch his death of cold.’ Then he frowned when he realised that Steyn had escaped from the back of the house. What the hell was Hammond doing?

  The question remained unanswered for Jenkins returned to the room, leading about a dozen men in various stages of undress. ‘Don’t know who these blokes, are, bach sir,’ he said, ‘but they don’t belong to us. And look!’ He held up three large saddlebags. ‘I’ve copped the Crown jewels, look you.’

  Simon became aware that more troopers had crammed now into the room and that all firing from outside had ceased. He scanned the faces of the men captured by Jenkins but de Wet was not among them. He felt his heart sink. Had the Boer escaped yet again?

  He turned back to the Boer who had recognised the galloping horseman. ‘Is General de Wet here? You will save yourself a lot of time and trouble if you tell the truth.’

  ‘No, English. I tell you the truth. De Wet is not in this town. He is in the country staying on a farm not far from here. But you will not catch him. He will know by now you are here. But, I tell you …’ the man nodded at the sheepish-looking men in Jenkins’s care ‘… you have captured most of the Free State Cabinet and,’ he gestured to the saddlebags, ‘most of our exchequer, too, by the look of it.’

  Fonthill nodded. ‘Jenkins, take these men outside, keep them under guard and find horses for them. I don’t want to hang about here. I am going to find Major Hammond.’

  He moved onto the stoep and walked around to the back of the house. There, the horses of the Cabinet and the guards were tethered to a rail by a long rope, allowing them to graze in a long trough filled with feed. Four troopers, rifles in hand, were poking among the bushes.

  ‘Where’s Major Hammond?’ he asked.

  One of the troopers turned. ‘Dunno, sir. He was behind us when we ran round here to the back.’

  ‘Behind you?’

  ‘Yessir. We were just in time to see that old chap leap onto a horse, cut the lead line and gallop off in his nightshirt.’

  ‘Was Major Hammond with you, then?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Sorry, Colonel.’ The languid voice of Hammond broke in from behind Fonthill. ‘Just been round the other side and tried to chase that old chap. Afraid he got away. Was he Steyn, then?’

  ‘He certainly was, the President of the Free State. We wanted him urgently. How the hell did he get away, Hammond, can you tell me? I told you and your men to cover the back of the house.’

  Hammond remained cool, perfectly poised. ‘Easier said than done, I’m afraid, Colonel. The firing from the garden was rather hot. We came in as soon as we could.’

  Fonthill held his gaze steadily but Hammond did not look away. Simon nodded. ‘Hmm. Very well. Get these chaps to move these horses out to the front. They will be needed for the prisoners. And give me a report quickly on casualties on both sides. We must move out quickly before the town rises against us.’

  In fact, the neighbourhood remained remarkably quiet. It was as though this little suburb of Reitz was used to night disturbances, with rifles being fired on sleepy crossroads. Simon looked around. Not even a curtain was being twitched.

  He walked to the front of the bungalow and called to Jenkins, who had herded the prisoners together. ‘Send a man to get our horses. Major Hammond is bringing horses for these men out from the back. Mount them but keep them under close guard. I am going back inside to make sure we have missed nothing.’

  ‘Very good, sir.’

  In the second living room, Simon found papers spread across a table carrying writing that seemed to be in Afrikaans. He bundled them together and stuffed them into an empty envelope. Then he quickly completed a search of the rest of the house. Apart from a few personal possessions, he found nothing of interest.

  Outside, Hammond was speaking to a sergeant. He turned as Fonthill approached. ‘Casualties light, sir,’ he reported. ‘None on our side but five of the Boers have sustained flesh wounds.’ He nodded to where five men were sitting, their backs to the stoep railing, while troopers applied field dressings to their wounds.

  ‘Good. I don’t want to take them with us. When they’ve been seen to, have someone take them across to that house over there and ask them to take care of them. I want to move out as soon as p
ossible.’

  While these orders were being carried out, Fonthill returned to the house and emptied the contents of the saddlebags onto a table. Inside were neatly tied bundles of ten, twenty and fifty English pound notes. He quickly counted. They totalled £11,500. Stuffing them back into their bags, Simon smiled. Not enough to defray the addition of two pennies onto income tax back home, he reflected, but also not a bad haul for the night’s work. The Orange Free State would be considerably disadvantaged by the loss of the majority of their Cabinet and, by the look of it, a great deal of their operational funds. But he would have gladly paid it all to have captured Steyn and de Wet. He shook his head. These Boers seemed to have the fighting skills of Hannibal and the elusiveness of Houdini.

  He gathered the bags together and within fifteen minutes he was leading his men, with its sorry group of prisoners, out of the town by the light of a pale, watery moon. On rejoining the backup troop he immediately sent it to scour the countryside and search any farms that might be harbouring General de Wet. He knew it savoured of shutting the stable door when the horse had bolted but it had to be done. Then, back with the main column, he ordered a middle-of-the-night breakfast to be provided for the prisoners and the returning troopers, before crawling into his sleeping bag, with one problem on his mind: was Hammond a coward or not?

  He woke in the morning with no resolution to the problem. He could not closely question the men who had been in the section with the major at the house for fear of spreading the word that he suspected his 2IC. He sighed. The dilemma would have to remain unresolved for the moment. But he determined to find a way of putting the matter to the test in the not-too-distant future. Hammond was in too key a post for him to stay with such a suspicion hanging over him. The matter would have to be resolved one way or another soon.

  For the moment, however, he must take his prisoners to Pretoria and, he fervently hoped, see his wife again.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The winter was now well established and a cold wind was blowing across the veldt as the column made its way to the north, taking a wide detour to avoid Reitz. The scouts had returned with no news of de Wet but Fonthill was uneasy. This was the Boer’s heartland and Simon knew he would be stinging from the narrow escape of President Steyn, nominally in de Wet’s care. Would there be an attempt to recapture the Free State’s politicians? If so, it could be soon, here in these undulating grasslands, studded with flat-topped kopjes that rose from the verdant plains like ugly warts on the face of a beautiful woman. These rocky outcrops and occasional shallow valleys could provide ample cover for any number of horsemen.

  By now, Fonthill had learnt that Kitchener had about 210,000 men under his command – the largest army that Britain and its Empire had ever sent overseas – but considerably more than 100,000 were needed for garrison duties and to protect the long British lines of communication. He guessed that, in the four States of South Africa, there were more than 60,000 British soldiers actively pursuing 20,000 members of the Boer commandos. These seemed overwhelming odds, but the sheer size of the country, the Afrikaners’ knowledge of the terrain and the determination and ability of their leaders – the lawyer Jan Smuts and burgher Ben Viljoen from the Johannesburg area had emerged to join Botha, de Wet and de la Rey as gifted commando generals – all combined to reduce that British advantage in numbers.

  Certainly, Fonthill felt no sense of superiority as he rode with his small force of one hundred and eighty men through countryside that took his breath away with its beauty and made him wince at his vulnerability. Accordingly, he took extra precautions. During the day, he sent his black trackers ranging far and wide for intelligence of enemy forces in the locality and ringed his little column with outriders to ensure that they were not taken by surprise. At night, he doubled the pickets, posting them some thousand yards from the camp.

  Shortage of water and fodder was a complicating factor. Many of the dams and streams had run dry and, by this stage of the war, farms could no longer supply feed for the horses. Twice a day whenever possible the horses needed to be led to water, with one trooper riding bareback leading another horse, often only to a muddy dam. The conventional British cavalry horses ate twenty pounds of oats a day, Fonthill’s little Basuto ponies considerably less. Even so, the daily ration provided by the army command was only eight pounds for each pony. It meant that the column’s mounts needed to graze to supplement the rations. This need added to Simon’s apprehensions about the vulnerability of his column.

  Any mounted unit in the field is at its most unprotected just before dawn, when sleepy soldiers tumble from their bedrolls, pickets return to the fold and horses are rounded up and saddled. However disciplined the camp, it is a time of some confusion.

  So it was that a little before daybreak de Wet struck.

  Predictably, the Boers launched their first attack just before light, appearing from behind a small kopje, galloping down a gentle slope to where the horses grazed some two hundred and fifty yards from the camp, whooping and firing to stampede the beasts. The little herd, however, was well guarded and each animal was loosely tethered to a wooden stake driven into the ground so that it could graze. Although the noise frightened the ponies, so that they reared and plunged, virtually all of the stakes held fast. In addition, the guarding troopers dropped to their knees and opened a rapid fire on the attackers, who were forced to swerve away, their purpose foiled.

  Fonthill was just pulling on his boots at the side of his bedroll – on the veldt he had ruled that no one should sleep under canvas – when he heard the firing. He got to his feet and grabbed his rifle. From where the horses were grazing he saw the flashes of gunfire. Of more direct concern, however, was the fusillade that was now directed down onto the camp from broken rocks much nearer, up at the top of the slope. Bullets hissed by his head but the fire in the dim light was badly directed and was too high. It was also returned, for the camp guard was now coolly directing its own fire back to where the Boer marksmen could just be seen.

  All around Simon, half-dressed troopers were running to grab their rifles from where they leant in pyramids along the lines.

  ‘A Squadron run to get the horses!’ screamed Fonthill. ‘At the double. NOW! Officers, direct your men to encircle the camp. Be prepared to repel a charge.’

  He whirled round as he heard the thud of horses from behind him. He sighed with relief as he realised it was the pickets from the other three sides of the camp who were riding in now, their heads low along their ponies’ necks. They rode into camp and flung themselves from their saddles. Then he swivelled back. That meant that the pickets stationed out wide from the side from which the Boers had appeared must have been overwhelmed. But without firing a shot! Surely not!

  Fonthill caught a glimpse of Hammond running low with his squadron out to where the horses were under attack. Then Jenkins was at his side, shirt tucked into breeches, rifle and bayonet in hand.

  ‘Will they rush us, d’yer think?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes. Probably try to ride us down, if there’s enough of them. Get Forbes and Cartwright to come to me, quickly as you can. Then make sure the prisoners are guarded and are lying down. Tell them that they will be shot if they move.’

  ‘Very good, bach sir.’

  Jenkins doubled away and Fonthill was quickly joined by the two captains. ‘Have you got your men out ringing the camp?’

  ‘Spreading out now, sir,’ said Forbes.

  ‘Same with my lot, sir.’

  ‘Good. I think they may try and charge us on horseback to try and cause panic. They will probably ride straight through the camp, dismount and then open fire at close range on us. It looks as though we are not surrounded so they’ll come down that slope up there from behind those rocks. Who’s in the rear here?’

  ‘My squadron, sir,’ responded Cartwright.

  ‘Tell them to fix bayonets, hold their fire until the Boers are through and past them. Then give them rapid fire. I only hope that Hammond has been able to sav
e the horses. Double away now.’

  A bullet thudded into the ground at Simon’s feet to show that the Boers were adjusting their aim and he ran, crouching, to join the thin line that faced the riflemen firing from behind the rocks. He looked along the line. There was precious little cover and each man was spreadeagled along the ground, so vulnerable to charging horsemen if he rose and fled. He bit his lip. He should have erected some kind of barrier round the camp, although there was precious little timber or stone to be found on this green grassland. At least it looked as though none of his men had been hit yet. Only a question of time, though …!

  A grunt showed that, once again, Jenkins had reached his side, the first rays of the rising sun catching the beads of perspiration that ran down his cheeks. Fonthill gave him a welcoming grin.

  ‘Good man. Now. It looks as though you could do with some more exercise. I want you to double along the line here and tell the men that horsemen could charge us. They should fire as they come in but they should not, repeat not, stand and run. They will be safe if they do not move, for horses will jump over them. Then they can turn and fire at the Boers’ backs. But be careful. We have our own men behind us.’

  ‘Bloody ’ell.’ But Jenkins turned and loped away.

  The firing seemed to die away and Fonthill directed his gaze to where the column’s ponies were grazing. The light was not strong enough to see whether Hammond had been able to save them but it seemed as though the firing out there had stopped too. He hoped that the man would have sufficient sense not to try and bring the horses back into the compound now. They would be ripe targets for the Boers if he did so. Then a shout from the camp periphery made him turn.

  ‘Here they come!’

  He looked up the slope to see the edge suddenly grey with horsemen, stretching in a line behind the rocks so that they extended around the camp, about as far as one quartile of the men lying defending it. Then, as he watched, he heard a faint cry of ‘Burghers, storm!’ and the line trotted forward, broke into a canter and then a gallop so that it presented a magnificent sight, men bent low, their rifles presented as though they were lances at Agincourt, the ground now trembling beneath everyone’s feet, attackers and defenders alike.