Hervey 08 - Company Of Spears

by Allan Mallinson

  XVII

  BUSH CRAFT

  Next day

  The officer commanding the frontier provided the party with a dozen good country-breds, some with a fair bit of blood, all with a good measure of bone, and none with feathers. The biggest, by Hervey’s reckoning, stood fifteen hands two, the smallest a full hand less. They would not have done for a regiment at Brighton, but he knew at once they would serve here. They would have served in India, too, he felt certain, though requiring a little more corn perhaps than the Marwari with which the regiment had lately become so attached. These, he imagined, would be the look of the remounts for the Rifles once the rough-riders had finished with them – the quarters muscled through collected work rather than, as now, merely on the shoulders through galloping freely, and the coat flat and glossy rather than staring. Any of these Algoa troopers would carry him well, for they looked handy and no doubt possessed a good turn of speed over a quarter of a mile. Just the sort of horse to have under him in a sudden brush with Xhosa.

  Twelve horses: a second saddle horse for each of them, and a bat-horse apiece too. Corporal Wainwright had at once begun making the arrangements.

  An hour or so into the march, the morning fresh and the sun climbing, Private Johnson edged his mare up alongside Hervey’s.

  ‘Does this remind thee o’anywhere, Colonel ‘Ervey?’

  Johnson had not spoken much to begin with on the march. Hervey suspected he had a sore head, for the Fifty-fifth’s canteen had been a hospitable place, and the bingo – ‘Cape Smoke’ – improbably cheap. But in truth Johnson had drunk no more brandy than he was capable of, which was not a great deal: he was, anyway, long past the soldier’s practice of drinking, camel-like, all that was available in order to sustain him through weeks of drought. Johnson, for all the appearance at times to the contrary, had a sense of occasion. And on those contrary occasions, Hervey had come to recognize that Johnson had invariably discerned something of the circumstances that he himself had not. What Johnson in his silence had been doing was allowing – consenting to – the growing attachment between Hervey and Fairbrother, for Johnson misliked (or liked) no man for his complexion. True, he thought Indians were detestable (except the ones he knew), Spaniards despicable (except all those brave guerrilleros), Portuguese shameless (except General de Braganza, the army and most of all Dona Isabella Delgado), and the Hottentots and Kaffirs – if that was what they were here at the Cape – beneath contempt (except that he had enjoyed the crack with several black faces in the canteen last night). But this Mr Fairbrother – Captain Fairbrother – as Hervey insisted on calling him, was not Indian, or Spanish or Portuguese or African: he was a gentleman; and that was all there was to be said of the matter.

  Perhaps not all. The other officers whom Johnson had known did not talk much about books and such like. And it seemed to him that Hervey was enjoying it a very great deal. If Captain Hervey – or Major, or Colonel, or whatever it was today (he truly thought brevets more complicated than …) – if Captain Hervey needed one thing it was a good friend. And not a woman-friend (Johnson had his decided opinions on these) but another officer. There was Captain Peto, but he was always at sea, and there was Colonel Howard, but he was always in London; and since poor Major Strickland was killed there was no one in the Sixth with whom Hervey could talk on what it was that officers talked about – officers and gentlemen talked about.

  Colonel Hervey sometimes talked to him, but he knew it could not be the same. And in Hounslow it had all so nearly come to an end. He did not think of the prospect of a prison hulk so much as the deprivation of that life that had come to mean everything to him: the Sixth and ‘his’ officer. People had always been good to him – or at least fair. And over the business of the coral … well, he had not expected to remain the commanding officer’s groom after that. Yet here he was, taken back like the son in the Bible who went off and ate with the pigs. What had he to complain about ever when such a man as Colonel Hervey was his officer? He had never known anything of the coral; he was only doing as he was told. But he supposed that wouldn’t have made any difference if Colonel Hervey – and Serjeant-major Armstrong and the others – hadn’t been there to help him.

  Yes, he certainly approved of ‘Captain’ Fairbrother. He was the sort of friend that Colonel Hervey needed. Perhaps if he had had a friend in Hounslow … No, he must not think like that. But why else would his officer want to marry this Lady Lankester, someone he’d hardly ever met? It was none of his business, of course: what an officer chose to do was his own affair, and quite beyond the understanding of the rank and file. But he did not relish the idea of serving a new mistress. There would never be anybody like Mrs Hervey – not even Mrs Delgado (although she was the one he wanted most to see filling her shoes)…

  Hervey concluded where Johnson was thinking of. ‘It puts me in mind of Salisbury Plain. On a fair day, that is.’

  ‘That’s what I reckoned, sir. Is it all like this? Ah thought there were jungle, an’ lions an’ things.’ Hervey turned to Fairbrother, with a rueful smile that invited a response to Johnson’s boundless question on the natural history of the Continent.

  ‘Well now, Private Johnson,’ began Fairbrother, endearing himself at once by the appellation of rank, however lowly. ‘Do you recall how many days you were sailing to the Cape?’

  Johnson frowned. ‘Abaht fifty, I think it were, sir.’

  ‘About fifty; and perhaps some forty-five of those were spent traversing the coast of Africa, one way or another; perhaps a hundred and fifty miles in the day. You may therefore calculate the very great distance that is this continent from north to south. And in the space of those several thousands of miles, there is all manner of country – desert where a man would bake like bread in an oven, and be dried like a piece of leather for want of water. Then there is grassland, as here, where there are great herds of all manner of beasts – lion, elephant, antelope, camelopard, though here there are not so many, for the Xhosa and the Dutch have driven them out of the grazing lands to make room for their cattle. And in the middle of the continent, where the rain falls very heavy, and the growth is prodigious, there is jungle – the deepest forest you might ever see, with apes of every description living in the trees without ever placing a foot upon the ground.’

  Johnson’s brow was screwed up very tight. ‘Don’t think ah’d like that, sir. Ah wouldn’t like being somewhere there were things over thi ‘ead.’

  Fairbrother’s expression almost matched Johnson’s as he struggled to make sense of the pronunciation and vocabulary. ‘And things underfoot.’

  ‘Ooh ay, sir. When we were in India, or wherever it were – in t’jungle there – there were all sorts o’ things, an’ snakes as thick as thi leg.’

  Hervey smiled to himself. Johnson was allowed his exaggeration – except that in Johnson’s imagination it was no exaggeration at all.

  ‘’As tha been in t’jungle then, sir?’

  Fairbrother was increasingly charmed by Johnson’s candour (there had been occasions, when first he had joined the Royal African Corps, when he had been derided for his presumed jungle origins). ‘I have. But not, I imagine, as much as Colonel Hervey. And, of course, I have no knowledge of how similar are the forests of India to those of Africa.’

  Johnson was not inclined to think the differences very great; he had disliked the forests of India, and he had no doubt that he would dislike those of Africa just as much. ‘So there isn’t any jungles ‘ere, then, sir – in t’Cape, I mean?’

  ‘No, there is no jungle. There is forest, quite dense, but we are not near enough to the Equator to make it so … fearsome. We may see elephant – I think we shall see elephant – and leopard; or rather we shall hear leopard, in the night. And the going will become thick with scrub near the rivers… ‘

  Although he gave the impression otherwise, Johnson was not greatly exercised by the topography, or fauna, of the Eastern Cape. It was merely that the place did in truth resemble Salisbury Plain so much
, which he had grown almost as fond of as Hervey had been during their sojourns in Wiltshire. He was intrigued by how quickly the country here might change, and into what. At the edge of the Wiltshire plain there were fields of corn or cattle; what was at the edge of this plain?

  Fairbrother truly did like Johnson. Hervey could see it. And yet Hervey could only wonder what would have been his new friend’s reaction had he seen the real Johnson, the man undiminished by the business of the coral smuggling. Johnson had lost a measure of his cheeriness, his unbounded – at times almost senseless – optimism. At first Hervey had enjoyed the respite, for Johnson’s chirpy certainty he at times found decidedly wearing; but after a while he had come to feel it like the loss of an old, if irascible, relative, the loss infinitely greater than the respite. This presage, first-swallow-like, of Johnson’s return to a state of (respectful) familiarity was therefore much to be welcomed. The leaving of Hounslow – of England – had in the end been so precipitate, what with endless duty calls as well as family, and then the requirements of his betrothal, that he had not been able to give his groom-orderly more than passing attention. He had been rather thankful of it in fact, for anger, exasperation and disappointment had been mixed in powerful measure, and it was as well there had been no opportunity to delve into it. Now it was meet to restore their former relations.

  * * *

  At Graham’s Town, a settlement of few stone buildings but to Hervey’s mind a busy, optimistic sort of place nevertheless, they found the detachment commander was laid low by an attack of dysentery. His lieutenant was new, so it was the landdrost who received them and told them of the ‘Clay Pits Trouble’, as already it was becoming known on the frontier. Hervey listened to the landdrost carefully, glancing periodically at Fairbrother for any sign of dispute, but seeing none. The landdrost was an old Cape hand, who had seen service with both the Cape Regiment and then the Albany Levy. He took the view that General Donkin – and Lord Charles Somerset – had made admirable plans, but that in reality the life of the frontier was not to be regulated as if it were a place subject to the usual laws of property and the border itself a mere party wall. The affair of the clay pits, he observed, was but one example of the ‘untidiness’ of the frontier and the difficulties in applying the ‘Donkin doctrine’ to the letter.

  The clay pits, explained the landdrost, were about five leagues due east, an easy enough three-hour ride – two with fresh horses at a gallop. And the Fish River was two and a half leagues beyond. The pits were firmly within the colony itself therefore, not the unsettled, patrolled tract. The clay had been used for generations by the Xhosa for dyeing blankets and to paint themselves. The trouble was, he told them, the clay pits were on the farm of one John Brown, who had come east with the first 1820 settler parties. Brown complained that of late he had lost a hundred and sixty cattle and a dozen horses, and that the occasional patrols from Graham’s Town, or Fort Willshire in the unsettled tract, were no protection. The soldiers, he claimed – Hottentot troops – merely hid in ambush, shot at the Xhosa as they approached the pits and then cut off the ears of those they had killed as proof of their zeal and prowess. This, suggested the landdrost, accounted for growing Xhosa enmity. The trouble was, other settlers in the area were trading with the clay-seekers: cattle, ivory, hides and gum in exchange for beads, buttons, wire and trinkets. And since the settlers’ cattle was for the most part unbranded, it was not difficult to imagine the temptation for the Xhosa. One of the settlers had been killed not many months ago when a patrol had appeared unexpectedly and the Xhosa thought they had been betrayed. It was therefore no longer merely a matter of petty lawbreaking but of murder, and – though he was guarded in his expression of it – the landdrost evidently felt that the military were not cooperating as fully as they might in his investigations.

  ‘What’s to be done?’ asked Hervey.

  The landdrost’s jaw jutted. ‘I would wish to have one of Brown’s neighbours by the name of Mahoney arrested for illegal trading, and his land confiscated. That ought to still the activity. I have asked the military to station two men on Brown’s property until such time that I can determine on a conciliatory course with the Xhosa. Brown’s claims of losses I find loose and exaggerated. They’d be wholly impossible to verify without actually tracing the cattle to the Xhosa kraals. Might I accompany you? At least as far as to Brown’s farm and the clay pits.’

  Hervey had no objection. He trusted his own powers of observation and discernment in strictly military affairs (if there could be such a thing as strictly military), but in judging the civil conditions at the frontier he knew he would be wise to have counsel of the civil authority.

  The following morning, Hervey and his party, accompanied by the landdrost and three pandours who would act as scouts – Hottentots from the Cape Corps detachment – left Graham’s Town for Brown’s farm and the clay pits. It was another fine day, with a few high, barred clouds to remind them that the sea was not so very distant, but otherwise in the vast carpet of green and yellow – rich grass that sorely tempted the horses, and a flower he did not quite recognize – Hervey could have believed himself in the middle of a continent rather than at its furthest edge. Johnson, however, was soon voicing his disappointment by the lack of game, big or otherwise. They saw the odd bush-buck, and plenty of birds, but nothing, he reckoned, they would not have seen in India. The landdrost, drawn in by Johnson’s simple curiosity, as Fairbrother had been the day before, explained that when they reached the Fish River they would see more; and if then they were to ride south towards its estuary, they would see hippopotamus, buffalo, antelope in many guises, and perhaps even the black rhinoceros.

  The names meant less to him than the landdrost supposed, especially since Johnson did not reveal his ignorance. He knew what a buffalo was, and for that matter antelope (he understood, too, that there were different types), but hippopotamus and rhinoceros were wholly novel. In any case, what he wanted more than anything to see was elephant. In India he had become quite used to them: they were but a part of the scene of daily life, domestic even. In Africa, however, he had heard that elephants were twice the size of their Indian cousins, with tusks that might gore a horse in an instant, toss it aloft indeed; and that these beasts ranged in herds ten times more destructive than a whole brigade of charging cavalry. This he wanted to see at a safe distance yet close enough to judge for himself the power of those massive tusks – any one of which, besides spelling death, might also bring him considerable fortune.

  The road to Brown’s farm was a good one. It was not so much made as well travelled, though not by waggon, so that it was evenly worn rather than rutted, allowing a comfortable pace at both walk and trot. In two and a half hours, as the sun was nearing its highest, though its heat was no more than a June day on Salisbury Plain (and certainly nothing to what they had been used to in Bengal at this season), the party arrived at the farm. There was no marking its boundary save for a stone at the roadside, no fence or cleared perimeter, but half a mile distant they could see a cluster of white-washed buildings, and wispy smoke rising from a single chimney.

  ‘Do you know where his cattle graze?’ asked Hervey, puzzled that there was no sign of them.

  ‘Beyond the buildings yonder,’ replied the landdrost, looking about him at the good spring grass. ‘He ought by rights to have driven them up here by now, but the water’s all on the other side of the farm, and it’s easier. Brown’s not the most industrious of men. This is good soil here, and he ought to be growing maize, wheat even; but ploughing’s hard work, especially when cattle take no looking to at all.’

  ‘Except when the Xhosa take a fancy to them.’

  ‘Exactly so.’

  When they came to the farmhouse, a plain, single-storey, stone-built affair with an iron roof, they found the two men of the Cape Corps saddling their horses in the lean-to stabling.

  ‘Is John Brown hereabout?’ called the landdrost.

  The men, both Irish, red-coated but hatless, loo
ked tired and dirty. It appeared to dawn on them slowly that here were reinforcements. ‘Ay, sor,’ said one of them, belatedly knuckling his forehead and standing to attention. ‘T’other side of the farm. Xhosa were thieving again last night, sor. Drove off a hundred head and more.’

  Hervey decided that this was now as much military business as civil. ‘Stand easy, Corporal. What is Brown doing about it?’

  The man turned to him, looking relieved to be in receipt of orders again. ‘Sor! Him and his men are trying to catch loose horses, and then he says he’s going to ride to Blaufontein to get up a posse of burghers, sor – Dutchmen.’

  Hervey looked at the landdrost.

  ‘He’s within his rights, though I would wish he didn’t take the Dutch. They’re a good deal more savage, and that’s the last thing we need.’

  ‘I think the Xhosa’ve taken one of the boys with them as well, sor,’ said the corporal, looking now to the landdrost. ‘At least I hope they’ve taken him, and not just stuck a spear in him.’

  ‘One of the Hottentots?’

  ‘No, sor, one of the white boys.’

  ‘Oh God,’ groaned the landdrost. ‘That gives us little option but to chase them hard. What do you think, Captain Fairbrother?’

  Fairbrother and the landdrost had got on well together the previous night. They had met before, when Fairbrother had come with his company of Royal Africans in the late troubles. The landdrost was evidently more disposed to take his advice than he would have been the Graham’s Town lieutenant’s. ‘I am of the opinion that if the Xhosa are chased by Dutch burghers they’ll fight as if it’s one band of brigands against another. If they’re pursued by redcoats – they’re not stupid – they’ll know it’s a matter of government.’

  ‘And?’ asked Hervey.