Fire Across the Veldt (7 page)

Then a cry from further along the line made him turn his head. A trooper was pointing at the kopje. ‘Firin’ from up there, sir,’ he said. ‘I’m pretty sure of it. It looks as though the Boers ’ave climbed up to get a better shot at us.’

‘No, sir.’ The trooper’s neighbour shook his head. ‘Whoever’s up there is fightin’ at the bleedin’ Boers. Look.’

Fonthill rolled over onto his back and attempted to focus his binoculars up the rock. Then he saw it. Two gun flashes. Then, two more from positions a little way to the right. He counted ten seconds and then two more shots were fired from different positions. He scanned the Boer lines. He saw the barrels of two rifles elevated upwards from behind an anthill. The Boers were indeed firing back at whoever was attacking them from up the kopje. And yet
six
men seemed to be firing down. Who could they be?

Hammond’s voice called across to him. ‘Colonel, I think they are leaving. Look.’

Fonthill rose to his knees. In the mid distance he saw horses being brought up and Boers mounting them. As he watched, one of the horsemen fell from his mount as a gun flashed from the kopje up above. He now saw the backs of the enemy as the Boers scrambled back; they were slipping away as silently now as when they had crept up to encircle the troopers.

‘They are retreating,’ Simon shouted. ‘Fire as you see them. Take out those horsemen at the back. Don’t let them get away unscathed.’

Once again a scattered cheer came from the British lines and it seemed to be echoed faintly from a little way up the rocky flanks of the kopje. Some of the men in the ring were now standing the better to aim and others were waving their hats in triumph.

A moment of doubt flashed through Fonthill’s mind. Were the Boers mounting to gallop to the base of the kopje, to climb it and dislodge the men firing down on them? But no. They were now streaming away to the east, in the direction from which they had first appeared. And they were riding fast, heads down, whipping their
ponies. In minutes they had disappeared, not circling away round the base of the kopje but stretching away, across the veldt.

Simon nodded his head. Botha had believed his story about sending for reinforcements and must have thought that the little party up on the kopje were the advance guard for French’s approaching force. But who were the marksmen up on the rock? Too many to be Jenkins and Mzingeli. He must find out. He called for his horse.

Disregarding cries of warning from Hammond and any thought of Boers still remaining to act as a rearguard for the main body, he galloped towards the kopje. At its base, he reined up and looked up.

‘Who are you?’ he called.

A familiar voice answered. ‘We’re fifteen battalions of the old 24th Regiment of Foot and we’re all dyin’ for a beer, look you.’

‘Jenkins! Where the bloody hell have you been? And who else is with you up there?’

‘’Ang on, bach sir. We’ll come down and all will be revealed in a minute, see.’

A feeling of huge relief surged through Fonthill as he sat in the saddle, grinning like a clown and trying to catch a glimpse of the figures above him. Eventually, just as Hammond joined him, he saw first Jenkins and then Mzingeli emerge from the belt of scrub and scramble and slide down the remainder of the rock. They presented a sorry sight, for their clothing was torn and their hats seemingly lost. Perspiration poured down their faces but they each still carried their rifles.

Fonthill dismounted and, with Hammond present, resisted the temptation to embrace them both. Instead, he shook their hands.

‘Where are the others?’ he asked.

‘What others?’

‘There were at least six men firing. I saw the shots.’

A great smile split Jenkins’s face. ‘Ah bless you, ba … er … sir. I remembered one of your old tricks. So old Jelly an’ me fired an’ moved, fired an’ moved, to give the impression that we was more than just two, look you. It affected our shootin’ a bit, ’cos we only downed about four of the bastards, but we ’ad to be quick, see.’

Fonthill exchanged looks with Hammond, whose normally solemn face was now carrying the trace of a smile. ‘Well, you fooled me and the Boers. They must have thought you were a relieving force. So what happened to you out on the veldt?’

‘Ah yes.’ Jenkins’s jowls seemed to sag for a moment. ‘Sorry to be late back reportin’ like, sir. My ’orse broke ’is forelock when ’is foot caught in one them rat ’oles or whatever they are and I ’ad to shoot ’im. We also ’ad to give up our chase of them springbuck animals. Jelly’s pony ’ad to carry the two of us and we was on our way back when we ’eard shootin’ in the distance. We ’id the ’orse round the back there and climbed a bit of a way up the koppey thing to ’ave a look and saw that you were in a bit of a mess. So I made old Jelly ’ere an ’onery member of the 24th Regiment and we decided to attack. So to speak. But, before you say anythin’, sir, I would like to point out that we didn’t get lost.’

‘No,’ said Fonthill dryly. ‘You had Mzingeli with you. Come on, let’s get your horse and rejoin the column. We have wounded to get back to our base.’ He nodded to the tracker. ‘Well done, Mzingeli. We seem to have lost the three scouts I sent out. Any idea where they might be?’

‘No, Nkosi. I hope Boers do not meet them.’

‘So do I. Come along. We must move.’

In recovering Mzingeli’s mount they discovered a small pool surrounded by a few stunted trees, so Fonthill ordered the horses to be watered there. The Boers had ridden off without their dead and, as usual, their wounded, for they knew that the British would look after them. A burial party was mustered to bury the enemy dead, after their bodies had been searched and their identity noted so that their relatives could be informed, but the British were wrapped in capes and slung across horses to be taken back to Johannesburg for interment. The lightly wounded were ordered to ride back but those who could not were carried on makeshift stretchers, made from wood from the trees near the poolside and slung between two horses.

This mournful task completed, the column turned back for the base that had been established for it at the mine outside Johannesburg, but this time Fonthill took care to set scouts riding far to the front, on each flank and the rear. They had been on the move for an hour before the first of their black trackers rode in and, in quick sequence, the second and then the third. The third, who had been riding point, far ahead of the column, on the march out, reported that a Boer commando had been seen riding fast to the east.

‘Humph!’ snorted Hammond. ‘Now he tells us.’

They eventually reached their base just before dusk. The wounded were taken into care and the men were dismissed. Fonthill scribbled a quick note to Alice, in Pretoria, and then settled to write his report, not without some anxiety. He had seemed, after all, to have ridden into a trap and had not set out conventional vedettes to safeguard his column against just such an attack. As a result, nine of his men had been killed, including a squadron commander, and thirteen wounded,
some eighteen per cent of his command. In addition, he had lost five horses, taken by the Boers before the handlers could regain the ring when first attacked.

However, he made the best of it. The Boer dead totalled eighteen, with a further seven left wounded. The enemy had, indeed, had slightly the worst of the engagement and had left the field first – an important factor in judging in military terms the success or otherwise of an encounter. He commended Jenkins and Mzingeli for their initiative and his men for their coolness under fire. At least there had been no panic.

He completed his report by candlelight in his tent, late that night, adding a request that a doctor plus two medical orderlies should be added to his column, put it in an envelope and sealed it. But to whom should it be addressed? Lieutenant General John French was his immediate superior officer but he had no idea where he was located. He sighed, scribbled French’s name on the envelope and was about to retire when he heard a familiar cough outside his tent flap.

‘Come in Sergeant Major,’ he called.

‘Saw your light on, bach sir,’ said Jenkins, ducking through the narrow opening, ‘and thought I’d just come and wish you goodnight, see.’

‘Pull up that canvas stool. The bottle is underneath it. I think we’ve both earned a dram. Here are two glasses.’

‘Ah well, if you insist.’ Jenkins uncorked the bottle and poured two generous measures. ‘What’s next then, for us?’

‘We await the pleasure of General French. But I have no orders and don’t know where he is.’

‘Ah well, bach sir. I can tell you that. I ’ear that ’e is due to arrive
on the train tomorrow midday. I expect ’e will want to thank you personally for putting the wind up that Botha bloke.’

Fonthill sighed. ‘I doubt it. But I suppose I shall have to report myself to him. You know, 352, I’m not sure I like being back in the bloody army, after all.’

They sat in silence for perhaps a minute and then Jenkins drained his glass and wiped his moustache with the back of his hand. ‘Ah well. If you remember, like, I did express a mild doubt about it myself.’

‘So you did. So you did. But time to turn in now. I am probably going to be carpeted by a British general tomorrow for the first time for … what? Oh, nearly twenty years. It will seem like old times. Goodnight, old chap.’

‘Goodnight, bach sir.’

Alice had decided that she would prefer not to join the rest of the foreign correspondents under canvas in the cantonment that had been reserved for them in Pretoria, near the chief of staff’s headquarters, and she had retained the hotel room she shared with Simon in the heart of the little town. She was not daunted by discomfort and it was, of course, more expensive, but she wanted to preserve her independence and have somewhere for Simon to stay when he was not riding out with his column. Luckily, money was no concern because the
Morning Post
had agreed very acceptable terms with her and, anyway, she and Simon had been left well endowed following the deaths of their respective parents some two years before.

She had cabled her first story, describing the brush with General de Wet and painting a word picture of the Boer commando: their bucolic rusticity clashing with the militancy of their rifles and bandoliers; the
paucity of their provisions lashed to their saddles; the incongruity of de Wet’s Prince Albert’s watch chain linked across his tunic and the civilian briefcase tied to his saddle pommel. She had led her story, of course, with his hint that the Boers would be looking to infiltrate the porous border with the Cape Colony. To her surprise, the official censor – a rather pompous little major – had let it through without demur. She made a mental note that he would probably be in hot water for that but she tossed her head at the thought. That was his problem. She had received a congratulatory cable back from her editor, welcoming her and demanding more.

More to the point, Alice now sat sucking her pencil to report on her meeting with Lord Kitchener. Predictably, he had played his cards close to his chest but his decision to ‘clear the veldt’ of the farms supporting the commandos had become common knowledge and she questioned him closely on this.

‘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 threat 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.’