The Sound of Thunder (30 page)

“My greetings to the General, Menheer, but we will hold out here a little longer. ” “As you wish,” the Boer acquiesced, “but first you must see if any of these, , be pointed at the khaki figures that were scattered among the dead mules and horses, , you must see if any of them are still alive. And you must destroy the wounded animals. ” “It is kind of you, Menheer.”

“You will, of course, make no attempt to pick up weapons or ammunition.”

“Of course.”

The Boer stayed with them while Eccles and half a dozen men searched the field, destroying the maimed animals and examining the fallen troopers. They found one man still alive. The air hissed softly from his severed windpipe and a froth of blood bubbles writhed about the hole. On a blanket they carried him down to the river, bed.

Eleven dead, sir, ” Eccles reported to Sean.

“Eccles, as soon as the truce ends we are going to recover another Maxim and the two cases of ammunition.

They stood beside the scotch cart and Sean inclined his head to indicate the bulky, blue, metal led weapon that showed from beneath the tarpaulin.

“Very good, sir.

“I want four men ready below the lip of the bank. Make sure each man has a knife to cut the pack ropes. ” “Yes, sir. ” Eccles grinned like a playful walrus and drifted back towards the river, and Sean strolled across to the mounted Boer.

“We have finished, Menheer.

“Good. As soon as I cross the skyline up there, then we’ll start again. ” “I agree.” Sean walked back to the river, picking his way through the dead. Already the flies were there, swarming green and metallic, rising like a migrating hive of bees as he passed, then settling again.

Sean reached the bank and below him Saul crouched at the head of a bunch of unarmed men. Behind them stood a very disgruntled Eccles, his moustache drooping in disappointment.

Instantly Sean saw what had happened, Saul had used his superior rank to take over command of the volunteers. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Sean demanded, and Saul answered him with an obstinate stare.

” You’ll stay where you are. That’s an order!” He turned to Eccles. “Take over, Sergeant, Major,” and Eccles grinned.

This was no time to argue. Already the Boer horseman was half way up the ridge. Sean raised his voice and shouted at the long line of men below the bank.

“Listen, all of you. No one is to fire until the enemy do. That way we may be able to spin it out a little longer. ” Then less loudly as he spoke to Eccles. “Don’t run, just walk out casually.” Sean jumped down the bank and stood between Eccles and Saul. All three of them peered up at the ridge and saw the Boer reach the crest, wave his hat and disappear. “Go!” Sean said, and all of them went.

Eccles, the four volunteers, and Saul. Flabbergasted, Sean stared at the six of them as they strolled out towards the scotch cart Then his anger flared. The stupid little bastard, and he went also.

He caught up with them as they reached the scotch cart and in the strained silence of the suspended storm he growled at Saul: “I’ll fix you for this!” and Saul grinned triumphantly.

Still there was a puzzled silence from the ridge, but it could not last much longer.

Together Saul and Eccles slashed at the ropes that held the tarpaulin, and Sean pulled it back and reached for the gun.

“Take it. ” He passed it to the man behind him. At that moment a warning shot cracked over their heads.

“Grab one each and run!”

From the ridge and the river came gunfire like a long roll of drums, and they ran doubled beneath their loads and dodging, back towards the river.

The man carrying the Maxim fell headlong. Sean threw the ammunition case he carried, it dropped short of the bank, but skidded forward and toppled over the edge. Hardly pausing in his run, he stooped and gathered the fallen Maxim and went on.

Ahead of him first Eccles, then Saul jumped into safety and Sean followed them with the three surviving troopers.

It was over, Sean sat waist, deep in the icy water with the machine, gun clutched to his chest, and all he could think of was his anger at Saul. He glared at him, but Saul and Eccles knelt facing each other grinning and laughing.

Sean handed the gun to the nearest trooper and crossed to Saul.

His hand fell heavily on his shoulder and he pulled him to his feet.

“You, ” He could not find words cutting enough. If Saul had been killed out there, Ruth would never have believed Sean had not ordered it so. “You fool,” he said and might have hit him, but he was distracted by the cries from the firing platform beside him.

“The poor bastard!”

“He’s up.”

“Lie down, for God’s sake, lie down.”

Sean released Saul, jumped up on to the platform and stared through the loophole in the schranz.

Out in the open the trooper who had carried the Maxim was on his feet. He was moving parallel to the bank, shambling with a curious idiot gait, his hands hanging loosely by his sides. They were shooting at him from the ridge.

Held in the paralysis of horror, none of them went to him. He was hit and he lurched but tottered on with the Boer rifles hunting him, staggering in a circle away from the river. Then, suddenly they killed him and he dropped on to his face.

The gunfire stopped and in the silence the men in the river, bed began to move around, and talk of trivial things, avoiding each other’s eyes, ashamed to have watched such a naked intimate thing as that man’s dying.

Sean’s anger was gone, replaced by guilty thankfulness that it had not been Saul out there in the open.

In the long period of stagnation that followed, Sean and Saul sat together against the bank. Though they talked little, the old sense of companionship was restored.

With a rush and rattle the first shell ripped the air above their heads, and with everyone else Sean ducked instinctively. The shell burst in a tall brownish, yellow spurt on the far slope. Consternation bush fired along the river.

” Oh my! they’ve got a gun!”

“Book me on the next train, mate!”

“Nothing to worry about, boys,” Sean shouted reassuringly.

“They can’t reach us with that piece. ” And the next shell burst on the lip of the bank, showering them with earth and pebbles. One startled second they stood dazed and coughing in the fumes, and the next they fell on the bank like a band of competitive grave, diggers.

Dust from their exertions rose in a pale brown mist over the river to puzzle the Boers on the ridge. Almost before the arrival of the next shell, each man had hacked out a small earthen cupboard into which he could squeeze himself.

The Boer gunners were alarmingly inconsistent. Two or three rounds would fly wildly overhead and burst in the open veld.

The next would land squarely in the river spraying mud and water high in the air. When this happened the sound of sustained cheering drifted faintly down from the ridge, followed by a long pause, presumably while the gunners received the congratulations of their fellows. Then the bombardment would recommence with enthusiastic rapidity, which slowly wound down into another long pause while everybody rested.

During one of these intervals Sean peered through his loophole.

From a dozen points along the ridge rose pale columns of smoke.

“Coffee break up there, Eccles.”

“The way they do things we can expect another white flag and a couple of their lads coming down with coffee for us as well.

“I doubt it,” Sean grinned. “But I think we can expect them to come down though.” Sean pulled out his watch. ” Half, past four now.

Two hours to sundown. Leroux must try for a decision before dark.

” “If they come, they’ll come from behind,” Saul announced cheerfully and pointed to the slope of ground that menaced their rear. “To meet a charge from there, we would have to line the far bank and expose our backs to sniping from the ridge. ” Sean considered the problem for a minute. “Smoke! That’s it!

“I beg yours, sir?

“Eccles, get the men to build fireplaces of stone along the bed and set grass and branches ready to light,” Sean ordered.

“If they do come from behind we’ll screen ourselves with smoke. ” Fifteen minutes of furious activity completed the work. At intervals of ten paces along the river, bed they built flat, topped cairns of stone that rose above the level of the water. On each was piled a large heap of grass and wild hemlock branches gathered from where they overhung the bank of the river.

A little before sunset, in that time of shadows and deceptive light, with a haze rising in the still, cold air to mask them Leroux charged his horsemen at the river.

Sean heard a low drumming of hooves as though a train passed in the distance and started to his feet.

“Here they come!” somebody shouted. “The bastards are coming from behind. ” With the low sun at their backs throwing big, distorted shadows ahead of them, they swept down in a long line from the west.

“Light the fires!” bellowed Sean. They were lying flat on their horses, five hundred of them coming in at a full gallop and shooting as they came.

“Maxims!” Sean shouted. “Get the Maxims across!” The teams dragged the heavy unwieldy weapons from their emplacements and floundered with them across the stream. From each of the fires blue smoke spread and lifted. Men coughed and swore and splashed to their new positions. From the ridge a Mous covering fire raked the river and then the field, piece crashed shell after shell amongst them.

“Fire at will!” Sean shouted. “Hit the bastards. Hit them.

Hit them hard. ” The din was appalling, gunfire and bursting shells, the hammering beat of the Maxims, shouts of defiance and pain, the thunder of charging hooves, crackling of the flames. Over it all a dense fog of smoke and dust.

With elbows on the rough shale of the bank, Sean aimed and fired and a horse went down, throwing rider and rifle high and clear.

Without taking the butt from his shoulder he worked the bolt and fired again. Got him! swaying and twisting in the saddle. Drop, you bastard! That’s it, slide forward and fall. Shoot again, and again.

Empty the magazine. Hitting with every shot.

Beside him the mate lot traversed the Maxim in a deliberate hammering arc. Fumbling, as he reloaded, Sean watched the Maxim scythe its slow circle of destruction, leaving a shambles of downed horses and struggling men, before its beat stopped abruptly and the mate lot crouched over it to fit a fresh belt from the wooden case. A bullet from the ridge, fired blindly into the smoke, hit him in the back of the neck and he fell forward, jamming the gun, blood gusting from his open mouth over the jacketed barrel. His limbs twitched and jerked in the epilepsy of death.

Sean dropped his rifle and dragged the mate lot off the gun , levered the first round of the belt into the breech and thrust his thumbs down on the buttons They were close now. Sean bore down on the firing handles to raise his fire, aiming at the chests of the horses.

The sailor’s blood fried and sizzled on the hot barrel, and the grass in front of the muzzle flattened and quivered in the continuous blast.

Above him a solid frieze of milling horses was outlined against the darkening sky, the men upon them pouring their bullets into the crowded river, bed. Wounded horses plunged down the bank, rolling and kicking into the mud.

“Dismount! Dismount! Go in after them!” an old burgher with a neat blond beard yelled.

Sean dragged the gun around to get him. The man saw him in the smoke but his right leg was out of the stirrup, his rifle held in the left hand, helpless in the act of dismounting. Sean saw his eyes were grey and without fear as he looked down into the muzzle of the Maxim.

The burst hit him across the chest, his arm windmilled, his left foot caught in the stirrup as he went backwards and his pony dragged him away.

The attack broke. The Boer fire slackened, ponies wheeled away, and raced back for the shelter of the hills. The old burgher Sean had killed went with them, dragged upon his back with his head bouncing loosely over the broken ground, leaving a long slide mark of flattened grass.

Around him Sean’s men cheered and laughed and chattered with jubilation. But in the mud there were many who did not cheer and with a guilty shock Sean realized he had been standing on the corpse of the sailor who had died over the gun.

“Our round, that one!” Eccles beamed. Callous among the dead as only an old soldier can be.

“Yes,” Sean agreed.

Out in the open a horse heaved itself up and stood shivering.

one leg hanging broken under it. A wounded burgher started to cough in the grass, choking and gasping as he drowned in his own blood.

“Yes, our round, Eccles. Put up the flag. They must come, down and collect the wounded.

They used lanterns in the darkness to find the wounded and kill the horses.

“Nkosi, at a place where the river turns and the banks are low, they have placed men,” Mbejane reported, back from his reconnaissance on which Sean had sent him. “We cannot escape that way.”

“I thought as much,” Sean nodded, and held out the open can of bully beef to Mbejane. “Eat,” he said.

“What’s he say, sir?” Eccles asked.

“The river is held in force downstream.” Sean lit one of the cheroots that he had recovered in the darkness from the saddlebag of his dead horse.

“Ruddy cold sitting here in the mud,” Eccles hinted.

“Patience, Sergeant, Major,” Sean smiled. “We’ll give them until midnight. By then most of them will be down the other side of the ridge drinking coffee around the fires.

You are going to rush the ridge, sir?” Eccles obviously approved.

“Yes. Tell the men. Three hours’ rest and then we’ll take the ridge.

“Very good, sir.

Sean lay back and closed his eyes. He was very weary, his eyes felt gritty from the dust and smoke, his lower body was wet and cold, his boots heavy with mud. Lyddite fumes had given him a blinding headache.

I should have put a look, out on the ridge, he thought again.

My God! What a mess I’ve made of this. My first command and already I’ve lost all the horses and damn, nigh half of my men.

I should have put a look, out on the ridge.