Death on the Ice (8 page)

Oates smirked at this. ‘Anyone else?’

‘Saddler, shattered collarbone, I should say. Can’t fire.’

‘Get those two to leave their ammunition and follow the river bed back to town. Divide their rounds between the men. They’ll only be a distraction.’

Despite himself, Docherty looked impressed. ‘Sir.’

Oates risked a peek over the edge of the bank. Crouched Boers were moving down the hill. He shouldered the carbine and let off a quick burst of fire. The others joined in. The shots were woefully ineffective, the earth spitting clouds of grit where the bullets were falling short of the commandos, but it sent them scurrying for cover.

He slid back down. ‘Staff corporal?’

‘Sir?’

Why wasn’t he frightened? His mouth was dry, but then, it was hot and he could feel sweat running down his neck. His heart was jerking about in his chest, but not from fear. His mind remained unclouded by panic. He had expected his guts to turn to liquid. They had done no such thing. Oates was quietly pleased with himself. ‘They’ve got decent rifles. We’ll have to aim higher with these old crocks and hope for the best. I want you to space the men out and get them firing to keep the Boers on the hillside where they are. Two at a time, random pattern of firing. Understand? Don’t want the lads being shot like fairground ducks.’

‘No, sir.’ Docherty looked worried.

‘Problem?’

‘Good idea, sir. But the ammunition won’t last all day if we do it continuously. And them cunts’ll be on us in a flash if we run out of bullets. Pardon me.’

‘We only have to last till relief comes,’ Oates said. ‘They’ll have heard the firing. And when our chaps get back, they’ll raise the alarm. Someone’ll be along pretty smart to help us out of this corner.’

Docherty nodded, but both thought the words sounded distinctly hollow. ‘Best get to it, then.’

‘Yes, staff corporal, best get to it. And tell them to take their helmets off. They offer no protection and they provide too big a target.’

The Boers were in no hurry to come rushing down. They moved now and then to draw fire, hoping to exhaust the British supply of rounds. Oates used his firepower as sparingly as he could. A half-hour into the skirmish he lost another man, shot cleanly through the forehead. He urged the others to stay calm, explaining that the Boers were expecting wild retaliation.

The sun climbed and, with no shade but their terrified horses, the water supply became critical as they slaked their thirst. Oates ordered them to take no more than a capful an hour. He regretted not instructing the wounded men to leave their canteens as well as bullets.

Docherty popped his head up, but instead of firing he slid back down. ‘Flag of truce approaching, lieutenant.’

It was a young Boer, dressed in civilian clothes, a rifle slung over his back, a white sheet on a stick waving before him.

Behind the boy, Oates could see figures moving into position under cover of the Inniskillings’s hesitation. ‘Tell your comrades if they move again the flag won’t count for a fig,’ he yelled. He made a show of cocking the carbine to make the point.

The farmer looked over his shoulder and barked something incomprehensible. The scurrying stopped.

‘And you. That’s far enough.’

‘Colonel Fouche presents his compliments,’ the young man said in an accent so thick it was as if he was chewing the words. ‘Colonel’, Oates knew, was a self-appointed rank. There was no army and no consistent ranking system with the Boers. They didn’t even possess proper uniforms. ‘He says if you surrender you will be released and all your private property bar weapons guaranteed.’

Oates looked at Docherty, who shook his head. They had all heard tales of Boer perfidy with prisoners, even summary executions. ‘Tell him to fuck off and stick it up his arse. Sir.’

‘I’ll rephrase if you don’t mind, staff corporal.’ Oates took a sip of water and cleared his throat. Then he stood up, exposing himself to the fire of the gunmen who lay in the scrub no more than a hundred yards away. Foolhardy, but it gave him a chance to spot their positions. ‘Please tell the colonel, thank you for the kind offer. But we came here to fight. Not surrender.’

‘Respectfully,’ the lad replied, ‘you are outnumbered.’

‘Respectfully, only by Boers.’ That gained him a guffaw from some of the men and a scowl from the farmer’s son. ‘So, please, tell Colonel Fouche to continue.’

With that he flopped back into the gulley, just in time to glimpse the bent figure trying to outflank them. He was a good two hundred yards along the river but Oates squeezed off four shots, causing him to scamper back the way he had come. The parapet of the riverbank above his head, meanwhile, began to spit dirt as hefty .303 rounds hit home.

‘Well done, sir,’ said Docherty.

Oates raised his eyebrows. He wasn’t so sure it was the wise thing to do. But surrender had no appeal.

The fusillade lasted less than ten minutes and the Boers went back to pot-shots. They managed to take down a horse that had struggled to its feet, despite the best efforts of its rider. It whined pitifully and its cavalryman put a mercy bullet through its skull. The others looked away as he cradled the head of the dead animal before returning to his position.

Oates told the men roughly where he had seen the gunmen and the British fired at their positions on an irregular basis. By midday, though, the first of Oates’s troopers had run out of ammunition.

‘Leave your water,’ he told Wilder, the bullet-less trooper. ‘And your carbine. Horse?’

Wilder pointed across to the site of the ambush, where the scout and several animals lay baking in the sun. ‘Shot from under me.’

‘Well, keep your head well down, run back to town along the river bed as fast as you can. Report to the colonel and tell them our situation. Take this.’ He handed the lad his revolver. If the Boers got close enough for Oates to have to use it, he was done for anyway, but it might help Wilder if he ran into any stray commandoes.

‘And ask them where the fuck are they,’ Docherty chipped in.

‘Tell Colonel Herbert,’ Oates corrected, ‘if it isn’t too much trouble, we’d quite like a relief party.’

Wilder sprinted off, covering the ground like a primate, on all fours. He made it without mishap to the far bend where the course of the river kinked and, with a fast backward glance, he was gone. Oates listened carefully for the sound of sniper fire but, apart from two shots from their own tormentors, there was nothing.

Another of the group fired his last round an hour later, and Oates repeated the exercise, sending him along the river to gee-up Herbert. Docherty took a bullet to the shoulder shortly afterwards. Oates inspected it and found it a clean puncture, although clearly it hurt like a demon, because Docherty trotted out a stream of profanities escalating in intensity and explicitness till he slumped back against the bank. Only then did he allow Oates to stuff a makeshift bandage inside his tunic.

‘Sir. Down to the last two rounds.’ It was Peyton, a corporal.

‘Off you go.’

Peyton looked offended. ‘What if they charge the position, sir?’

‘Well, at least you won’t be here to see it. Bugger off. None of us is much use without ammunition.’

Soon after Peyton’s departure, there came an explosion of distant rifle fire, borne on the hot breeze blowing from the West. That could, thought Oates, be a rescue party fighting its way through. Or being routed.

They took one further casualty shortly after that, a nasty neck wound to a trooper called Carlisle. Oates watched as a field dressing was put on it, but the white gauze and linen bandage was soon soaked crimson as it wicked up the blood. Now Oates, at last, began to feel fear, the possibility that none of them would make it out alive. Much as he was afraid for himself, he couldn’t countenance the loss of a whole patrol.

‘Docherty, I want you to take everyone back to town. Leave me the weapons. I can pretend to be the whole unit—’

‘No, sir.’

‘No?’

‘Corporal Ronson is y’man. He’ll take them. I’ll stay here. Don’t fancy four miles of crouching with this shoulder.’ Oates knew that a pathetic excuse but let it pass. ‘I’d best stay with you and Carlisle, ’cause he’s too bollocksed-up to make it as well. If the others can get through, maybe they’ll get the arses moving.’

Some of the troopers were equally reluctant to leave, but Docherty called them and their mothers unspeakable things and soon the three of them were left alone with the restless horses. Oates let the most troublesome gallop off after the retreating troopers. The remainder he gave a few splashes of precious water each.

Another hour crawled by, punctuated by probing shots from the Boers. Docherty and Oates took turns to check the enemy’s progress, popping up at varying intervals along the bank—with and without helmets—to try to swell their apparent numbers. Apart from a splash of dirt in his eye, Oates remained unscathed. Carlisle, though, was beginning to moan. He gave the trooper some water, but his eyes were rolling and there was an unpleasant sheen on his forehead and upper lip.

‘We might be in a fix, here, sir,’ said Docherty.

‘True. But we’ve got most of them away.’

Docherty took another peek over the bank and let out an exclamation of surprise.

‘Sir. Take a look.’

Oates scrambled to the edge and popped his head up for a second. Then he brought it up again, more slowly. Up on the ridges he could see the Boers gathering, and a string of horses was being led to them. He watched them mount and ride off with a feeling of disbelief.

‘Lord above,’ he said. ‘What’s got into them?’

‘Maybe the fuckers’ cows need milking,’ offered Docherty.

Oates laughed. ‘Maybe they do, staff corporal.’

He waited ten minutes before he risked standing. Then he brought the horses to their feet and walked over to Carlisle to see if the man was capable of getting himself in the saddle.

Oates saw the puff of smoke from the ridge moments before the sniper’s bullet smacked into his thigh, spun through the muscle and crazed the bone, sending him to the ground into the brilliant light of absolute agony.

T
HERE WAS BLOOD ON
the ice. Puddles of it glowed a garish red against the white background. Curlicues of vapour issued from the fresh pools as the warm liquid cooled and congealed. The greasy slick made for uncertain footing as the men, now dressed for the most part in their light but windproof Burberry gabardines, moved over the floe.

The corpulent crabeater seals barked and rolled away, confused by what was happening, but didn’t take the sensible course of sliding into the sea. Another shot, the sound deadened by the great slabs of frozen water, and another spray of crimson splattered across the floe. That made six dead seals. Then the butchering began, turning the ice pink as the hot fluid from the entrails hissed across the frozen surface and diluted the blood.

Scott, swathed in greatcoat, cap and scarf, stood at
Discovery
’s rail, watching as Wilson supervised the chop, as the doctor called it, creating a stack of seal steaks from one of the carcasses. The others would be skinned and hung from the ratlines, where they would freeze.

Raucous, pushy skuas were gathering, anxious for a share in the massacre, swirling and squawking. Skelton took a pot-shot at them and they whirled away, before finding their courage again moments later. Sinister sooty petrels patrolled above the mêlée, also waiting their turn at the feeding table, along with the more attractive blue-grey fulmars. A whale breached nearby. Scott wondered if it was a killer, drawn by the blood sliding down the five-foot edge of the floe and staining the green water black. It might explain why the surviving seals were reluctant to slither free. They were stuck between the murdering devils and the deep-cold sea, which glistened with submerged frazil-ice, the slush of solidifying seawater.

Scott’s eyes ached from the glare. He had been up all night, unable to pull himself away from the ever-changing scene. The endless dance of light on ice was more fascinating than he had ever thought possible. As the sun skimmed the horizon for a brief time and then rose again, the shades went from crimson to burnished copper to salmon pink to a soft, rose hue. Sometimes bands of different colours played over the floes, like earth-bound rainbows, at other times a sea fog reduced everything to a dull grey. The harsh light when an unclouded sun shone on the pack was fearsome and he often had to wear goggles. Sometimes the same sunlight struck a mist-shrouded berg and caused it to glow with an inner light of jewel-like intensity and rays of sapphire and jade to shoot across the waters.

‘All done, skipper.’ Shackleton and Skelton, who had performed the shootings, returned onboard, cradling the rifles, their breath coming hard after the exertion of execution.

‘We’ll do the sheep next,’ said Shackleton brightly. ‘They can be skinned and frozen too.’

‘Very well.’ Scott caught the smell of seal guts on the wind as Wilson eviscerated a crabeater. ‘I hope those things taste better than they smell.’

‘A few months in and they’ll taste just fine,’ said Skelton. ‘Even the skuas.’

‘Well, I should wind up the electrometers. And perhaps take a pipe to get that stench out of my nostrils. Gentlemen.’

‘Skipper.’

‘Is he all right?’ Shackleton asked as Scott moved to the wooden hut that housed the two self-recording clockwork quadrant electrometers which measured the earth’s potential gradient on a roll of paper. Scott spent a long time watching the dots on the continuous roll of paper, recording the fluctuations in the planet’s magnetic field. Apparently, he couldn’t wait to set up his device for measuring the ionisation of the air.

‘Skipper doesn’t like the slaughter,’ the engineer replied, recalling how he had barely tolerated the killing of the penguins on Macquarrie Island, en route to New Zealand. ‘Bit of an animal lover, is our Commander Scott.’

Shackleton understood sentimentality about dogs and perhaps horses, but seals and sheep? Shackleton looked over the apparently endless floes and the bergs, which ranged from table sized to enormous mansions of ice, and at the dark channels between them. This ice-littered seascape appeared brooding and terrifying, but this was only the beginning. They had nudged through groaning, granular sea ice for two days and now they were on the edge of the far less accommodating pack ice, a confusing maze of black water and white tabulars. ‘Nervous?’ asked Skelton.