1999 - Ladysmith (31 page)

“Heavy firing on south-east and west!”

“NMR in fight, five killed, twelve wounded.”

“A hot action at Wagon Hill. Pickets are retiring. Being shot against skyline. Reinforcements requested.”

“Boers have captured south-east of Caesar’s. Artillery support requested.”

Although the General had a scale model of the town and its fortifications on a table in front of him, and was moving garishly painted blocks of wood (representing contingents of troops) around it, he seemed somewhat bemused by the scale of the attack. In places the Boers had broken through the lines and were shooting into the tents, killing and wounding men through the canvas.

Unable to determine much in the confusion of White’s HQ, Nevinson decided to go and see for himself. On riding up to Caesar’s Camp as dawn began to break, he saw that the Boers were indeed in possession of a part of it. If they take it outright, he reflected, we might not hold Ladysmith for very much longer. He wondered how near to go, and then the matter was settled when a volley of bullets flew by close enough for him to hear the whine of their flight. None hit him, luckily, but he took the precaution of dismounting and taking shelter in a nearby sangar. And there he remained for most of the day, in the company of some men of the Irish Fusiliers, under a Major Churcher. Shells and bullets came whistling from every direction for the next twelve hours, as seemingly endless waves of Boers came on and were repulsed by the troops General White was sending into the breach. Nevinson watched the panoramic show of the actions and, as the new men moved in over the dead, imagined the General where he had left him in the telephone room—the controlling Immanent Will, spinning out his electric messages across a brain-like web of resonating, twitching wires. Then he saw a real brain smashed open as a man next to him went down to a bullet, lumps of pink jelly and chipped bone spilling out with the blood.

The sun grew fierce above the sangar. Through a loophole in the stone breastwork, Nevinson could see the ambulance wagons and the stretcher-bearers going to and fro. There were no more casualties in his fort, although splinters of rock from bullet strikes were continually falling on him. Partly this was because the Fusiliers had put up a line of straw dummies, as though peering over the parapet, to draw the Boer fire and enable some of them to get out and move forward. These dummies, which even had sun helmets, uniforms and rifles strapped to their vestigial hands, must—through the smoke of the battle—have seemed quite lifelike to the Boers, for they certainly kept shooting at them.

The dummies’ camouflage received a boost later in the day, when a heavy storm came on and rain and hail obscured the opposing sides. The downpour also added to the discomfort of the living bodies. No one manning the defences had any food, nor any water except what was in the canteens on their belts, and after having burned up earlier, all were now shivering with cold.

Nevinson managed to get out at about five in the afternoon, but returned after half an hour with a tin of milk and some arrowroot for Major Churcher, who was exhausted. By this time, the British were gaining the upper hand, and at about six the Devons carried out a successful bayonet charge over on Wagon Hill. By seven, control over the two hills had been re-established. The mopping-up lasted till dark. On getting back to the cottage and taking off his soaking clothes, Nevinson went straight to bed feeling ill. He’d be damned if he’d catch a chill.

The morrow brought a dull, damp day, as if to thwart him in his determination to ward off a cold. He sat down to write up the battle, after getting an idea of the casualties from Colonel Hamilton at White’s HQ. Altogether, about five hundred men had been killed or wounded on the British side, to some eight hundred on the Boer side. He was about to set this down when, struck by a thought, he stopped and laid aside his pen in disgust. He did not seem to be able to get beyond the background of glory, the military shorthand with its ‘algebraic signs and formulae of slaughter’ (he had picked up his pen again, and was writing this instead), its ‘conventional language that conceals reality as well as any legal convention can’: the bayonets sliding into flesh as though it were butter, the overpowering smell of horses, the gashes in a stomach raked by shrapnel. Journalism was not up to the task. Nor was literature: only Mr Hardy came close. No wonder that the armies of the past vanish, their ancient dead only rising from the furrows of buried time to laugh, invisibly, at the very pageants of memory by which we seek to summon them.

B
y January 15, Steevens had lost consciousness. He looked so much worse that Nevinson, who saw him that morning, decided to send off a warning message to Mrs Steevens by heliograph. After despatching the nurse to fetch Major Donegan of the Royal Army Medical Corps, said to be the best doctor in the town, Nevinson climbed up to each of the signal stations in turn. But to his irritation he found them busy with military traffic. He left instructions with a signaller, and rushed back down to Steevens’s tent. Major Donegan was already inside. He decided to inject strychnine, and about noon things began to look a bit more hopeful. Nevinson went outside and sent a galloper to prevent the heliograph message. There was no point in causing unnecessary distress to Mrs Steevens.

The strychnine stimulant proved relatively effective, and Steevens regained consciousness. MacDonald and Maud were fetched, and Steevens lay there blinking at his three fellow correspondents—Donegan having left to see to other patients.

“He’s sweating heavily,” observed MacDonald.

“You don’t say sweating, Mac,” said Steevens. “You say perspiring.” Then he lifted his hands to his face and groaned.

“Come on, George,” said Maud. “You’ve got to fight it. It’s gripped you, and you’ve got to strengthen yourself—will it away.”

Steevens took his hands away, and gave Maud a cynical look. “All right then,” he said, “let’s have a drink.”

The war artist went and fetched some champagne, part of a cache that had been hidden against the event of relief, and poured it into a beaker, which he held against Steevens’s lips. Nevinson was pained to see how swollen and split they had become. The sick man winced when the fizzy liquor went into the cracks, although he managed to finish the beaker. It seemed to have a good effect, and he began talking—about another colleague, Churchill.

“I remember once, when he came to dinner at my house, he said we were all worms, but he was a glow-worm. It made me laugh, but even then you could see how ambitious he was. It came off him like light off a lamp. Astonishing. I’m so glad he has escaped. Nevinson, if I don’t make it, tell him that I love him.”

“That you love him?” The signs of raving were coming back, and along with it a high-pitched, tumbling tone of voice, so different from his usual restrained yet casual tones.

“Yes, he is a nice boy. You will tell him, won’t you? But don’t tell him what a worm you feel when the enemy is plugging shells into you and you can’t plug back.”

He tried to struggle up out of the camp bed, but then fell back exhausted.

“Don’t be thinking like that,” said Maud, laying a hand on his shoulder. “You are going to be all right.”

“And if Lynch ever comes back, tell him I will let him off the bet.”

“What’s that?” queried Nevinson.

“I had a bet with him of a dinner. I backed our cottage to be hit against another that he selected; and I won. He was to pay the dinner at the Savoy when we returned. He said, too, that the shells were like angels’ visits, more or less. Well, soon I will be in a place where I can verify his conjecture. Tell him that, too.”

“Stop talking now, old chap, you’ll tire yourself,” said MacDonald.

“Well, you are in command. I’ll do what you like. We are going to pull through.”

Then he rolled over and went to sleep, and between four and five o’clock that afternoon, passed quietly from sleep into death. The funeral was set for that very night. It was the rule of the town: so many were dying now that they could not be left unburied for more than a few hours, for fear that the corpses, rapidly decaying in that heat, would spread the disease.

On their way back to the cottage, Nevinson and MacDonald walked in silence at first, falling into step so that they matched each other pace for pace.

Then MacDonald spoke. “I shall miss the cocksure, logic-chopping blighter.”

“I too,” said Nevinson.

“I am surprised he went. I thought he really was going to pull through. You don’t think that champagne was an indiscretion?”

“Of course not. It was a dying man’s comfort. The fever had him by the throat. The doctor reckoned he had a weak heart, and that that was what got to him.”

“God, this is a wretched, man-eating place. It is taking the best of us. He was good, wasn’t he? Next to Bennet Burleigh, the ablest in the field.”

“The best, I think. Look how Burleigh ran out on us here. George had a touch of genius, beyond question. I can’t think of any other journalist who was able to give such a kick to his reports. Everything was dramatized. What Kipling does for fiction, he did for fact.”

“Yes…I suppose so,” said MacDonald, with some hesitation.

They buried Steevens that night. It took until half-past eleven for the coffin to be built—the wood for the job having been ransacked from a ruined building—and the ceremony took place at midnight. Most of the correspondents turned out for it, together with a good many officers and a few civilians. About twenty-five people in all, mounted on horseback, followed a small, glass-covered hearse up the hill to the graveyard. A soft rain was falling and, every now and then the donkey pulling the hearse let out its ghastly bray, which echoed between the silent rocks. On the way, Nevinson saw Tom Barnes and his friend, who stopped and saluted in the moonlight. This silvery pall, falling down through ragged edges of cloud, reflected on the hearse, the glass of which was covered in black and white embellishments, and on the lines of white crosses marking the graves of earlier fatalities. As the thin ropes lowered the coffin, the Boer searchlight on Umbulwana began to play inquisitively on the scene, sweeping from side to side, and then settling its full glare on the grave. White and open, with its fringe of grass and waiting lid of earth, the hole looked, thought Nevinson, like an eye. Then the light went off, and all was dulled, and the rattle of soil began to sound on the wood.

S
nare-drums and trumpets sounded him down the gangplank. On his arrival in Durban from Delagoa Bay, Churchill was met by a large crowd, cheering him in praise of his escapade. He also received a large number of telegrams from all over the world.

To wit: “My heartiest congratulations on your wonderful and glorious deeds, which will send such a thrill of pride and enthusiasm through Great Britain and the United States of America, that the Anglo-Saxon race will be irresistible.”

He took them with a pinch of salt, and after visiting the hospitals in the city—the sight of British wounded, the amputees in particular, had a profound effect on him—he hastened back to the British lines. He learned the news about Ladysmith, and how White’s force was still stuck there, in spite of considerable advances by Buller. He rejected the suggestions he heard in Buller’s camp that Ladysmith should be abandoned to its fate, and threw himself into the efforts to relieve the beleaguered town. Yet even he had doubts, and he watched the bombardments of the Boer positions with circumspection. Then he sat down to eat his luncheon.

The Biographer was one of the first to pass his congratulations to Churchill on the hero’s rejoining the relief column. In fact he did so during that very luncheon, after which he made a tour of the camp looking for images with which to fill his machine. The troops were hungry. In one part of the camp tales of a wagonload of hams that had got through to some other contingent seemed to thicken the air with the odour of the frying pan. The chap who told the tale larded it with pictures of the slices sputtering in the pan, and by the time he had finished it was almost too much for one soldier.

“Oh,” he cried. “Say them greasy words again!” The Biographer wished again for some device that could record a voice, as an adjunct to the lens. He had, furthermore, come to recognize the limitations of the technology that he did possess: during Colenso and subsequent actions, he had become aware of how, in spite of his best efforts to get a full picture of the conflict, even the Biograph’s panoramic view ended up being partial and confused. It was a matter of some concern to him that the officers in charge—Generals Buller and Coke, Warren and Woodgate, Colonels Crofton and Thorneycroft and Hill—really had no better a perspective on things than he did with his lens. The whole business seemed to be turning into a shambles. Every day, it was mooted that they would ford the Tugela, and—as it was said—“uncork the bottle’ in which Ladysmith was stowed. But at every attempt the Boers threw them back. Christmas passed. There were muted celebrations. Then the firing resumed. So it went on. Only by the New Year came good news: the campaign in Cape Colony was going well, and the Boers were gradually being ‘sidled and coaxed’, as Churchill put it, out of there. “Perhaps,” he remarked to the Biographer, “1900 will mark the beginning of a century of good luck and good sense…” And yet the guns still thundered. On January 6, there was so terrible a cannonade over Ladysmith that even Churchill and the Biographer could hear it at the relief column’s camp. How much longer could that heroic garrison survive? That day, at any rate, they did so, a message coming over on the heliograph to the effect that ‘General attack on all sides by Boers—everywhere repulsed—but fight still going on.”

The decision was taken to try to draw some of the Boer fire from the besieged town by creating a diversion near by. Perry Barnes was in the action; indeed, Churchill—taking notes for his next letter back to the
Morning Post—
heard him speculating on the effect of a Maxim machine-gun the Boers possessed. “You watch it…we’ll have that fucking laughing hyena let off at us in a minute.”