Fire Across the Veldt (12 page)

‘Even if ’e is a stuffed shirt who gallops off when the firin’ starts.’

Fonthill grimaced. ‘Now, 352, that is most unfair. He may well be a stuffed shirt but he has reached a good rank in the service and French obviously rates him. We have no evidence at all that he is a shirker, so serve him well and look after the men. I hope to be away for only a couple of days or so and will catch you up wherever the column moves. Good luck, old chap.’

The two shook hands, but Jenkins looked decidedly glum as he waved his old comrade away.

Alice met Simon at the station in Johannesburg when he alighted.
She was accompanied by a handsome young man with a slim moustache and a flashing grin.

‘Darling,’ said Alice, introducing them, ‘this is James Fulton of the
Daily Mail
. We have ourselves now returned from being with French in the Transvaal and I have only just been handed your telegram at the station as we got back here.’ She looked a little flustered and seemed only to take in Simon’s wounded arm in its sling as an afterthought. ‘Oh, my goodness,’ she said. ‘Your telegram said it was only a scratch, but you are all strapped up. How bad was it?’

Fonthill reached out with his good arm and pulled her to him. ‘As I said,’ he murmured into her ear, ‘it’s only a scratch.’ He kissed her and then released her and held out his hand to Fulton. ‘How do you do,’ he said. ‘I hope you’ve been looking after Alice?’

‘Certainly not, sir. She’s far too independent to let anyone look after her. I have just been trying to learn from her.’ He flashed his teeth in that confident grin. ‘Here, let me take your bag.’

‘That’s very kind of you.’ Simon turned back to his wife. ‘I hadn’t realised that you had been away. I haven’t had a letter for well over two weeks.’ He realised that this sounded like a rebuke and hastened to correct it. ‘But, of course, we have been out on the veldt and we probably missed our post.’

Alice flushed again. ‘I’m afraid I haven’t written for two weeks, my dear. We … I … have been riding pretty hard, too, with French, you know. There has been quite a contingent of press people with him. But he never pinned down any of the Boer commandos, so we haven’t had much to write about.’

‘Ah, I see. Well, I’m glad that you were able to wait at the station for me. Not too long, I hope?’

‘No. Just half an hour or so.’

Simon realised that their conversation was ridiculously stilted. They were addressing each other with a studious politeness which was normally completely alien to them. This wooden formality, of course, was caused by the presence of Fulton. One couldn’t exhibit one’s normal loving exuberance while a complete stranger looked on. And yet … he felt uncomfortable.

Fulton intervened. ‘I hear that you had a lively brush with de Wet, Colonel,’ he said. ‘I would be most grateful to hear about it when you have a moment.’

‘Yes, of course. But first I would like to have a cup of tea with my wife. It’s been a long journey. I presume we still have our room at the hotel, Alice?’

‘Yes, I have retained it, of course. Let us get a Hackney here at the station. Will you join us, James?’

For a moment, Fonthill thought that Fulton was going to accept. That would have been intolerable. But there was something in Simon’s tone that even the brashest of men could not have ignored.

‘That’s very kind,’ he said, ‘but no thank you, Alice. I must get back to the compound and think what on earth I am going to cable about our gallivanting so uselessly over the veldt.’ He seized Alice’s hand and bowed low over it. ‘Thank you for your company, Alice. I have enjoyed it immensely.’ He turned to Simon and gave a half bow. ‘Delighted to have met you, sir. I bid you both good day.’

He turned and walked away.

‘Oh dear,’ said Alice. ‘You were a little peremptory with him, Simon. I hope he has not been offended.’

Fonthill looked at her quizzically. ‘Surely not. Any chap with
sensibility would know that, after a long absence, a man would want to be alone with his wife for a while.’

Alice coloured again – most unusually, for she was not coquettish, and certainly not with her husband. ‘Yes, well … It’s just that he’s been very helpful to me out on the veldt when hunting with the pack.’ She smiled at him, a great improvement he thought. ‘Perhaps I’m getting a bit too old for this lark. Come on. Let’s get back to the hotel and that cup of tea.’

There, she questioned him about the latest brush with de Wet. ‘I am determined to get this fellow, you know, darling,’ Simon confided. ‘It’s probably becoming a bit personal now, you know. Nearly had him twice, dammit, and he’s always slipped away. Third time lucky, perhaps.’

Alice shook her head. ‘It mustn’t get personal, darling. It might affect your judgement. Remember Ahab and the great white whale.’

‘Who?’

‘Captain Ahab in that wonderful book from America,
Moby Dick
. He becomes obsessed with hunting down a great whale and it leads to his death. Don’t let it happen to you.’

‘Well, I don’t know the book but I can’t quite equate de Wet with a white whale, somehow. Anyway, what’s your next great story?’

Alice put down her teacup. ‘There’s a woman out here, a Miss Emily Hobhouse. By all accounts she’s a rather dumpy, middle-aged spinster who has appeared from nowhere, but she is tackling Kitchener hard on the subject of the concentration camps that he is setting up to house the Boer refugees from his despicable farm-burning policy. This is close to my heart, so I want to meet her and find out what she is up to. If she stands up to scrutiny, then I want to help her. Give her as much publicity as I can.’

‘Hmm. Well, my love. Do be careful.’ He put down his own cup and moved towards her. ‘In the meantime, I wonder whether …’ He ran his fingers through her hair.

Alice pulled away from him slightly, her eyes failing to meet his and shook her head. ‘If you don’t mind, darling, I am so tired after all this travelling. And there’s your arm … I would like to sleep for a few minutes, if you would allow me.’

Simon stood stiffly. ‘Of course. I have to see French tonight. I will curl up on the other side of the bed and … er … compose my thoughts.’ But he was frowning and ill at ease as he removed his boots, undid his tunic buttons and lay down to rest, within touching distance of his wife yet, in fact, far, far away from her.

He met Major General French in the latter’s tent that evening at the appointed hour. The general remained terse and not exactly welcoming, although he expressed conventional concern for Fonthill’s wound.

‘Are you getting attention for that?’ he asked.

‘Oh yes, thank you. I am seeing the doctor in the morning. It doesn’t inconvenience me much. No bones broken and I can ride quite well with it. Frankly, General, I believe I could have stayed with my column and continued my duties and I hope that you will allow me to return to them as soon as possible.’

French nodded. ‘Good. Yes, well, I have read your report but I wanted to hear directly from you about this latest affray with de Wet. How the hell does he continue to get away from us?’

Fonthill took a deep breath and relayed the story, emphasising that it was the good work of his black tracker that led them to the elusive guerrilla leader. He repeated the commendation contained
in his report of the good work of Jenkins in taking command of A Squadron in its reply to the fierce fire from the Boer rearguard but did not dwell on Hammond’s absence. That could come out if it had to.

In fact, French did not ask the obvious question. Instead, he frowned and asked, ‘How could you have blundered into the commando? I understand that you only had black scouts out in front?’

Simon sighed. ‘Not quite, sir. We knew we were getting close to the Boers but we did not know how near. It was a question of following closely behind the black tracker who had discovered the Boer camp. So A Squadron led. It was pitch-black and the rain was driving down, hard in our faces. Our people out in front could hardly be blamed. In the poor visibility and conditions, the distance between them and the main column shortened. My responsibility, of course.’

‘Yerse. Pity you couldn’t have staked out and sent back for Knox.’

‘Quite so, sir.’ Fonthill’s mind raced. He had emphasised the bad weather conditions in his report, yet French had seized on the fact that he did not have conventional outriders going ahead. How did he know this? Hammond, of course. He decided that it was time to record the major’s departure from the fight.

‘It was also a pity, sir, that we lost Major Hammond in the fracas.’

‘What? What happened to Hammond? He wasn’t in your casualty report.’

‘No sir. He is unhurt. But it seems that when the first shots were fired and I was hit, Hammond’s horse bolted and he could not control it. It took him some way away from the action and in the miserable conditions, he lost his way. He rejoined our camp, after our retreat, just before dawn the next morning.’

French frowned. ‘Good lord. Philip Hammond is one of the best horsemen I know. Used to hunt with him in Leicestershire. Strange business. Ah well, these things happen.’

‘They do, indeed, sir. But it allowed Sergeant Major Jenkins to play a vital role in saving what was left of the squadron, for its officers were in the rear at the time. He also brought me round, as I lay unconscious under fire.’

Nodding slowly, the general made a note. Then he looked up. ‘Fonthill, you are certainly showing initiative and good scouting work in at least finding this blasted Boer, if not pinning him down.’ He leant forward. ‘This chap is getting remarkable publicity back in Britain and on the Continent. They call him the “Phantom Raider”, or some such nonsense. It is becoming even more important than before that we capture or kill him. He is making a laughing stock of us all. If he does get across the Orange – and it is clear that he is about to attempt this, of course – then he can cause all kinds of havoc in the Cape Colony, as we have discussed before.’

‘Quite so, sir. I feel I have an almost personal grudge against him now. I would like to continue the pursuit.’

‘Well, it’s not just you, of course. Lord Kitchener has assembled a considerable army in trying to corner the bloody man.’ He leant forward. ‘But K feels that you might have just the right temperament and ability to lead us to him and make him either surrender or stand and fight.’

‘Oh, he will never surrender. I am sure of that.’

‘Very well. I want you to rejoin your column as soon as you are fit enough to do so. You will remain under General Knox’s general command, although you will report to me overall. Kitchener has told
Knox that you are to have as free a hand as possible and that your casualties are to be replaced and your command is to be increased in numbers. If de Wet crosses the Orange, then cross after him and pin him down in the mountains on the other side before he can penetrate further south. Those are your orders. Is that clear?’

‘Perfectly clear, sir. Thank you for your confidence. I will travel south as soon as I can get clearance from the medics.’

French stood and held out his hand. ‘Good hunting, Fonthill.’

Alice saw her husband off two days later, waving him goodbye at the station with a heavy heart. She felt guilty, as guilty – if not more so – than when she had faced up to the fact that, married to Colonel Covington years before, she was in love with Simon Fonthill. She knew that she had hurt Simon and that he realised, although the matter remained unspoken, that someone or something had come between them. They had not made love during his brief stay in Pretoria for she had made much of her tiredness and her need to write her cables to London. They had failed to agree on the cruelty of Kitchener’s concentration camp policy, although she knew that he had done his best to avoid farm burnings. He argued, she realised, as much to make debating points out of frustration from her coldness as from conviction.

Walking back from the station, Alice felt ashamed. She shook
her head in self-dislike. It was, of course, James Fulton who had come between them. She had not been unfaithful in body to Simon but she knew that she had in her mind. On the veldt, as part of the correspondents’ pack with French, she and Fulton had ridden side by side, laughing and joking – she even sharing with him journalistic titbits that she had gathered to spark up her own bulletins. This was something that she had never done before. Alice Griffith never,
never
worked with the opposition. She hunted alone, always. Except now she had revelled in the companionship, the animal attraction of this handsome man, so much younger than herself, who had flattered her with his attention and aroused within her emotions that she knew should play no part in the workaday life of a forty-five-year-old married woman.

They had kissed once, very briefly in the starlight under a ridiculously romantic Transvaal moon. Then, she had pushed him away, shook her head and walked back to the fireside. But, oh how she had enjoyed it! And the next morning they had resumed their playful, coquettish courtship, as though nothing had happened. But it had and they both knew it.

Alice paused for a moment as she now strode back from the station and let the memory of that moment flood through her. Then, she stamped her foot. This would not do! She must end this thing before it became dangerous.

She diverted on her route to the hotel and turned off to the journalists’ enclave. But James was nowhere to be seen. She shrugged and walked on. She would face him the next time they met and explain that his pursuit of her must stop. Now, however, she must concentrate on her work.

A cable was awaiting her at the hotel from her editor, agreeing with enthusiasm her suggestion that she should concentrate on investigating the intriguing Miss Emily Hobhouse. The
Morning Post
had appointed another correspondent to lighten her load following Churchill’s return home and to replace the man killed at Ladysmith, so she was relieved of the task of hard news reporting which she had assumed over the last few weeks. Now she had the freedom to dig deeply for the colour stories that lay behind the campaigns. And, the editor wrote, the British public was growing uneasy about the camps. Alice now had a free hand to investigate and report on the doings of this little spinster in this militaristic environment. She rubbed her hands. Good. A story that she could get her teeth into – and one near to her feminist heart!

Alice had always followed the good correspondent’s practice of developing and nurturing contacts in the most unlikely places. A close, confiding smile, a flutter of her eyelashes and even the placing of a one-pound note in receptive palms from time to time, where necessary, had always stood her in good stead. Now, she hurried to Kitchener’s headquarters on some trivial pretence and was grateful to find a young subaltern she had cultivated busy at his desk. Did he, she wondered, know of this Miss Hobhouse who had been bothering the commander-in-chief and where she could be found? It was time, she confided, that the doings of this person were investigated.

The young man eagerly agreed. The woman, it seemed, had gained permission to visit one of the biggest of the new camps, at Bloemfontein, some one hundred and twenty-five miles to the south, and was there at that moment. The chief, it seemed, had been told by Whitehall that she should be allowed to go where she wanted, but he
had curtailed her travelling only to Bloemfontein. Alice flashed her best smile to her informant and turned away. No time to lose! She rushed back to the hotel, packed a bag and within the hour found a train that, blessedly, was about to steam south to Port Elizabeth on the coast, stopping at Bloemfontein on the way. Her press pass gained her admittance and, some two and a half hours later, she stepped down onto the platform in the capital city of the Orange Free State, now, of course, completely in British hands.

The pressure of reporting on the campaigns out in the field had prevented Alice from visiting any of these strange new camps before and she approached this one with interest, taken there by a young Kaffir driving a canopied Cape cart, hired at the station.

The development was, as she had expected, near the railway line. She well understood Kitchener’s reasons for building the camps, or ‘laagers’ as he called them. Apart from denying succour to the Boers still fighting by preventing them from visiting their homes regularly, they were intended to provide secure camps to house those burghers who had surrendered to the British. They and their families were at risk from the Boer guerrilla leaders who had made it their policy to drive these men from their homes. They had to be housed somewhere.

Alice stepped down from the cart, dismissed the driver and told him to return for her within two hours. She stood for a moment looking at the camp. Her first impressions were favourable. Yes, Kitchener might be unfeeling but he was not a monster. This was a huge village of white bell tents, laid out neatly in militaristic lines, all pegged out on the brown veldt of the southern slopes of a kopje, rising directly from the railway lines. Yet, there were
so many
of them. The difficulties of feeding the occupants must be prodigious. And where, she wondered,
was Emily Hobhouse? Looking from the lines of wire marking the boundaries of the camp, there was no sign of her.

At the guard tent, Alice showed her press pass to the sergeant and explained that she had arrived a little late to join the Hobhouse party. ‘Where, pray, is it?’ she enquired.

‘There ain’t no party, madam,’ grunted the sergeant. ‘Just that little lady on ’er own. She’s somewhere in the camp. God knows where.’

It took Alice almost an hour of walking along the rows between the tents to find her. As she went, she realised that overcrowding was rife. Children were everywhere and, from what she could see, tents that were meant to house, say, six soldiers, were now sheltering double that number. There were no standpipes for water nor
brick-built
boilers and, indeed, cooking seemed to be a matter of assembling a few sticks in the open and attempting to light a fire under whatever pots were at hand. Alice attempted to talk to several Boer
huisvrouws,
but none admitted to speaking English. In doing so, however, she was able to look inside several of the tents. The floors were of beaten earth on which mattresses were lined, each touching the other. Of conventional beds there was no sign. This was midsummer and the stench under the canvas was nauseous. Alice coughed and covered her nostrils with her handkerchief. Disease was in the air, of that there was no doubt.

She found Emily Hobhouse squatting on a stool at the end of one of the tent rows, busily writing in a notebook. Alice had wired the
Morning Post
library in London and asked for background details on the little spinster and now she hung back, out of sight, and quickly re-scanned the details she had been sent. Miss Hobhouse, it seemed, was forty-one years old and had spent years in a little Cornish village
near Liskeard as a companion to her father, an invalid archdeacon. Then, in a sudden and surprising burst of initiative, she had sailed for Minnesota and had embarked on a futile mission to convert Cornish miners to temperance, pausing only to be jilted by a fiancé in Mexico.

She had returned to England just as the war in South Africa was getting under way and had flung herself into supporting the pro-Boer Relief Fund for South African Women and Children. But she did have influential contacts, for her uncle was Lord Hobhouse, a distinguished Liberal peer, who had arranged for her to meet St John Brodrick, Undersecretary for War at Whitehall. The result was that, with official, if unenthusiastic approval, she had sailed for the Cape with the declared aim of distributing comforts to the interned Boer civilians but also with the intention of examining the conditions in the camps and reporting back to her Liberal sponsors back home.

Alice smiled as she examined this determined little woman. Miss Hobhouse was indeed as described: dumpy and spinster-like. Dressed as though for a cool, spring day in England’s West Country, under bonnet and several layers of stiff fabrics, she was busily scribbling, impervious to the heat or to the stares of the barefooted children who surrounded her.

Clearing her throat, Alice advanced. ‘Miss Hobhouse?’

Without looking up, the woman held up her hand. ‘Just a minute,’ she said. ‘I must just finish this.’

Alice waited dutifully. Then Hobhouse raised her head. If she was surprised to see an English woman coolly and unconventionally dressed in white shirt, jodhpurs and riding boots, she gave no sign. ‘Yes, what is it?’

Alice held out her hand. ‘Alice Griffith of the
Morning Post
.’

‘Ah.’ Emily Hobhouse rose awkwardly to her feet and shook Alice’s hand. ‘How do you do? I know of you. I have read your reports. Would it be presumptuous of me to think that we might perhaps have sympathies in common concerning this ridiculous war?’

‘Well …’ Alice smiled. ‘Perhaps. But Miss Hobhouse, I am most interested in the purpose of your visit and what you are hoping to achieve. I have travelled from Pretoria to see you and I would be most grateful if you could spare a little time to talk to me about it – although I certainly don’t wish to interrupt your work unduly now.’

‘Good gracious, interrupt me all you like if you can help me tell the people back home about these disgraceful circumstances here.’ Emily Hobhouse’s cheeks glowed like apples under her bonnet. She swept her pencil round in an embracing gesture. ‘Do you know, madam, that there are eighteen hundred people here.
Eighteen hundred!
In tents designed to take perhaps eight hundred rough, hard-living soldiers. There are little children – here, you can see – who don’t have shoes or proper clothes and I suspect are about to go down with the fever. I came out to disperse a few comforts from the Relief Fund but, good gracious me, these people don’t need comforts, they need clean water, fuel for cooking, and proper food. These conditions are disgraceful and far, far worse than I suspected.’

Alice held up a hand to stop the flow. ‘Miss Hobhouse, shall we find a little shade and perhaps you will allow me to take a note or two?’

The little woman nodded and they walked to where a solitary, sad-looking eucalyptus tree offered some shelter from the fierce sun. There, as Alice’s pencil flew along the page – oh, how she wished
again that she had learnt shorthand! – Emily Hobhouse told her of what she had learnt.

Here at Bloemfontein, it seemed, the city’s military governor, Major General Pretyman, had been courteous and anxious to help. But he had revealed details of the most incriminating kind. The families had been cleared from their burning homesteads and put down under canvas without care or forethought. There was not enough water to go round; soap did not exist in the settlement; no meat was supplied to those families whose men were still fighting, only meagre vegetables; and even those who did have meat existed on rations that hovered at starvation rate.

‘Some of the stories I have been told, madam,’ she continued, ‘have been horrendous. For instance, our General Bruce Hamilton posted a notice, after he had burnt the town of Ventersburg, telling them to go to the commandos if they wanted food. Now, I am here and seeing for myself. The camp latrines are quite inadequate and the authorities can’t cope. As you can see, the unemptied pails stand out in the sun, making the tents downwind of them unbearable to live in.

‘The authorities are at their wits’ end and they have no more idea how to cope with the difficulty of providing clothes for the people than the man in the moon. Crass male ignorance, stupidity, helplessness and muddling … and they don’t know how to face it.’

Alice took out a handkerchief and wiped her forehead. Miss Hobhouse, however, seemed impervious to the heat. ‘What do you intend to do about it, may I ask?’

‘Well, I am making a list now of the most vital deficiencies that I’ve seen here. That means soap, forage, more tents, brick boilers for drinking water, a tap water supply. I shall put these forward and see
what the reaction is. Then I intend to visit other camps and report back to my sponsors back home – and, indeed, to the British public.’

Putting down her pencil, Alice leant forward. ‘Miss Hobhouse, you asked earlier if I shared your opinions about … what was it you called this war … ridiculous?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘Well, let me tell you that I do, although my husband is a serving soldier out here and I don’t approve so much of the Boers’ attitude towards the Kaffirs and their idea of governance. Nevertheless, the farm clearances are, I believe, a barbaric act and I can see that this camp, at least, which I understand is the biggest, is a disgrace to a civilised nation. May I come with you and write in my newspaper about your activities and what you discover?’

Miss Hobhouse’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Travel with me? Well, my dear, let me warn you that I travel very light – although I have these comforts I intend to distribute – and also as quickly as I can.’

Alice smiled at the plump, overdressed figure before her. It would be hard to imagine any traveller looking less likely to move fast and untrammelled. ‘Miss Hobhouse,’ she said, ‘in my work and with my husband, I have travelled in many rough and distant parts of the Empire over the last twenty years and I am very used to hardship. I shall not encumber you, I promise.’