Fire Across the Veldt (13 page)

The woman looked at her quizzically. ‘Your newspaper is the
Morning Post
, I believe?’

‘Yes.’

She tilted her head to one side as though in gentle disbelief. ‘That seems to me to be an organ which often unthinkingly supports this Tory government. I fear, my dear, that, if the conditions here are
typical, what you may have to report may be rather unacceptable fare to your employers and your readers.’

Alice nodded her head. ‘Yes, I take your point. But my editor has already given me permission to write about you and your work, for, it seems, there is already some discontent back home about the camps and, indeed, the progress of the war. It is true that the
Post
supports the war, but it is not jingoistic and I am used to treading carefully around the difficulty of reporting events that sometimes stick in the craw of our readers.’ She sighed. ‘The point is, however, that truth is sacred and …’ she looked around her at the rows of tents ‘… I shall report not only what you say, but what I see. And being with you will allow me to see for myself.’

Emily Hobhouse gave a soft, gentle smile that lit up her homely countenance, replacing for a moment the frown that seemed to be her set expression. ‘Well, you shall come with me, if you wish. You must pay your own way and I shall welcome whatever light you can shed back home on the circumstances of these poor people. But you must call me Emily and I shall call you … what was it?’

‘Alice.’

‘Of course. Alice.’

‘Thank you, Emily. Now tell me. What are your immediate plans, for I must think of cabling arrangements?’

‘After seeing what I can do here, I intend to entrain to see about half of the camps here in the Free State – at Norvalspont, Aliwal North, Springfontein, Kimberley and Orange River. I have, of course, these basic comforts that I must distribute. Then I go to Mafeking in the Transvaal. That, I hope, will give me a fair sample of these places. Maybe I shall have time to revisit some of them before I return home in April.’

‘To whom will you report?’

‘To the committee of the Distress Fund, but I intend to see that my report is also circulated to all members of parliament. If, as I expect, these conditions are widespread, then I hope to be able to put forward sensible suggestions for improving the system, if, that is, it cannot be removed completely.’

Alice nodded. ‘I hope you will allow me to help you, Emily, as well as my journalistic duties will allow.’

‘I shall be grateful. Let us start now, then, by seeing all the tents in this awful place that I have not been able to visit yet.’

‘What? All of them?’

‘Oh yes. We must be thorough.’

At the end of the day, the two women repaired to the simple hotel in the centre of the town where Alice was able to find herself a room next to that of Emily. In the morning, the two of them saw General Pretyman and submitted to him a list of essential requirements for the camp.

He accepted them without demur, although with a frown, and Emily explained that she would not be leaving Bloemfontein until she had visited the general again, in two days’ time, to check on how well her suggestions had been met. Sitting silently at the meeting and watching how her companion handled the general, Alice realised that Emily Hobhouse was not only a determined woman but also a skilled and sensitive negotiator. There was no trace of bluster or the shrill insistence of the harridan. The case of the internees was put with reason and balance. Her admiration for the little woman grew. The next few months, she realised, could be very interesting.

The next two days were taken up with distributing round the camp some of the clothing and other comforts from the Distress Fund that had travelled with Emily and, in Alice’s case, with carefully drafting and cabling back her first story. She was careful to write it in an unemotional, low-key style, keeping to the facts and stressing General Pretyman’s seeming anxiety to help. She was anxious to avoid any editorial ‘toning down’. She also wrote to Simon, stressing her thoughts of him and urging him to take care of his wound. Then she picked up her pen to tell James Fulton where she was, but thought better of it. He must be left to ponder her departure and her whereabouts. It would be good for him.

On the third day, Emily and Alice visited the general to enquire of the changes that had been made at the camp. As before, General Pretyman – what a strange name for one so stolidly,
ordinary-looking
! – was courteous and frank. It was agreed that soap could be provided, but only at one ounce per head per week, and also brick boilers. But fuel was ‘too precious’ to be spared and tap water impossible to provide because ‘the price was prohibitive’. Emily warned that disease and deaths would follow but met with no bending of the official knee.

Alice spoke little but made copious notes. Nor did Miss Hobhouse continue to argue or make further demands. For the moment she would keep her powder dry. There were other camps to visit and, no doubt, other battles to be fought.

The two women now took to the crowded rail network. Their travels around the Free State and then, later, back into the Transvaal, coincided with a series of Kitchener’s great ‘drives’ across the veldt, and everywhere the two women saw open trucks standing at sidings,
full of women and children and the occasional man, exposed to the icy rains and hot sun of the high veldt. These sights, observed Emily, typified war ‘in all its destructiveness, cruelty, stupidity and nakedness’ and Alice could not remember seeing, in all her varied experiences of warfare, anything quite so heart-wrenching. The scenes, in fact, shook the two more than the sight of the camps, which at least presented a superficial picture of order and protection from the elements, with their rows of white bell tents, like medical dressings, thought Alice, covering suppurating sores.

The conditions in these camps varied, depending on various elements: the dedication and care of the superintendent in charge, the nearness of the supplies of water and fuel, the consciences of the local inhabitants and the care they showed and the dates when the camps were opened – for the earliest camps took first pick of the supplies.

Everywhere the two visited, Emily made pages of notes and then presented her recommendations for improvements, which were received with reactions ranging from wearied agreement and vague promises of remedial action to virtual indifference.

As they travelled, Alice continued to send her reports back to the
Post
. She struggled to keep indignation out of her stories, confining herself to factual accounts, leavened by descriptive quotes from Emily Hobhouse. She realised that not all of her cables were published – ‘too repetitively critical’ was one editorial reaction. But she also knew that many were used, with, as far as she could tell, little subediting. She also gathered that opinion was hardening in Britain against the war and its effect on Afrikaner civilians and she was glad to be playing some part in creating this, although she realised that without having the determined Miss Hobhouse as a
topical peg on which to hang her stories, she would have obtained far less space.

After six weeks of juddering, wearying rail travel, Emily and Alice returned to Bloemfontein to check to see what changes, if any, had been made since Emily’s first visit there. They found that all the improvements that had been made – few as they were – had been swamped by new arrivals following the new anti-commando sweeps.

The camp itself, which remained the largest in South Africa, had doubled in size and more were expected. Since they had left six weeks before, there had been sixty-two deaths in the camp and the solitary doctor supplied for the settlement was himself laid low with enteric fever. Two of the Boer girls that Emily had trained as nurses had also died.

‘I’ve seen enough,’ declared Emily one evening as the two sat together in their little hotel in the city. Emily, temperate to the end, was sipping cocoa but, as the conditions in the camps had worsened the further they had travelled, Alice had taken to taking two nips of whisky before they retired every evening. It was, she said, ‘the solace of despair’. She put down her glass now.

‘Will you leave now?’ she enquired.

‘Yes. I will sail for England as soon as I can get a ship. This whole system has been a gigantic blunder. It is piling disaster upon disaster.’ She leant forward. ‘Do you know, Alice, I was thinking today of a parish I had known at home of two thousand people, where a funeral was an event – and usually of an old person. Here some twenty-five are being carried away every day. The full realisation of the position has dawned on me. It is a death rate not
known except in the times of the Great Plagues. The whole talk is of death: who died yesterday, who lies dying today, who will be dead tomorrow.

‘I do not have accurate figures, but I understand that there are now more than ninety thousand whites and more than twenty-four thousand blacks in these camps.’

She shook her head. ‘I must return home as quickly as possible and present the facts to the British people. You have done wonders, my dear, but not everyone reads the
Morning Post
, you know.’

Alice took another sip of whisky, as though to anaesthetise herself against the scenes of death they had witnessed that day. ‘What will you recommend in your report?’

‘Well, of course, the huge deficiencies should be remedied immediately, with fuel, bedding, soap, clothing, diet and water supplies improved and the overcrowding and bad sanitation removed. Fundamentally, however, the whole system should be abolished. All those who have friends or relations who can take them should be allowed to leave the camps. No further refugees should be brought in. What’s more, seeing the growing impertinences of the Kaffirs, seeing the white women thus humiliated, every care should be taken to put them in places of authority.’

Alice hid a half smile. She had realised, of course, that Emily was a woman of her time with contemporary views about not mixing the races. But she was also a person of huge energy, great courage and simmering indignation with a moral backbone as rigid as the corset she habitually wore. ‘Good luck, Emily,’ she said, raising her glass. ‘It has been a pleasure and an honour to be with you.’

The next morning, Emily Hobhouse was on her way home, pecking Alice lightly on the cheek and then bustling aboard a train for Cape Town, to where she had cabled to make a reservation on board a steamer leaving for Southampton in a week’s time. As she watched her go, Alice felt a delicious shimmer of synthetic sympathy for those stiff-backed members of the Tory government – and of the right-wing members of the Liberal Party who supported them – who were not aware of what was awaiting them.

Back in the hotel, Alice completed her latest story on the camps: a summation of what she and Emily had seen over the previous six weeks and of what the doughty Miss Hobhouse intended to do on her return. She ploddingly then transposed this into cablese and took it to the cable office. Then, deep in thought, she returned to her room to write to Simon.

She had done so studiously once a week while on trek with Emily and, in return, had received two letters from him. This was as much as she expected, because she knew that he was somewhere in the south, far away from post offices. In both letters, his tone was cheery, unsentimental, of course, but still lacking that warmth that she was accustomed to receiving from him on the rare moments when they had been separated in the past. He was clearly still uncomfortable with her and she sighed. The events of the last six weeks had taken her mind off both her husband and James Fulton to some extent. Fulton had written to her once, having somehow found where she was staying for three nights on her peregrinations, for she had not written to him.

Alice re-read his letter now, before attempting to write to her husband. It was full of the warmth that was absent from Simon’s
missive; cheerful, bouncing in style even, but saying how much he was missing her and that things were not the same without her by his side, with her smile, her soft skin … She threw down the letter and put her head in her hand. How she missed him, too, dammit! She realised that her self-imposed absence, her immersion in the doings of Emily Hobhouse had not removed him from her mind or her heart. Oh, what to do about it!

She closed her eyes for a while and then picked up her pen and wrote, ‘My dear, dear Simon …’

On descending from the train, Fonthill found that General Knox’s camp had moved on and that his own column was said to be well in advance of the main force and was now ‘somewhere across the Orange’. That meant that de Wet had, indeed, found a way of crossing into the Cape Colony and that Simon’s reinforced column must be hot on his tail. God, things had moved fast in the few days that he had been away!

A sense of frustration descended upon him as he stamped around the remnants of Knox’s army, demanding a sound horse and provisions so that he could ride on and catch up with his men. Not only was he out of the action but, it seemed, his much loved wife had somehow lost her senses and was obviously in some sort of relationship with a much younger man. Such a thing had never happened in their sixteen years of marriage and it shook the very foundations of his life. Oh,
had it been a mistake to jettison all his principles and to rejoin the army as a regular soldier? It all seemed to stem from that. Well, there was nothing he could do about it, for he was too far away to fight this ridiculous affair at first hand. He must just rely on Alice, dear Alice, to realise how much he loved her and to understand where her duties lay – while he chased this slippery, wily, ruthless Boer …

A reluctant quartermaster captain eventually issued him with a horse and, even more reluctantly, a standard issue Lee Enfield and Webley revolver. ‘If you’re cavalry, you should have a carbine, sir,’ he argued.

‘But I’m not bloody cavalry, Captain. I’m mounted infantry. And I would like a bandolier with cartridges. Thank you.’

He set out following a compass bearing to where he had been told Knox could be found. And he found some relief in riding alone in the magnificent, rolling grassland and kopje-strewn country that swept down to the Orange River and the border with the Cape Province. His shoulder remained sore but he was able to extract much more movement from it now, even though he would be unable to use the heavy rifle he had demanded. Better not meet a Boer patrol, he reflected.

He soon came up with Knox’s new camp and was relieved to find that the general was away. His ADC confirmed that Fonthill’s Horse – now made up to some two hundred men and under the temporary command of Major Hammond – had ridden out two days before and had sent a message back to say that they had found traces of a Boer commando that had crossed the Orange at a place called Zanddrift. It seemed, however, that Knox had also received a strong report that de Wet was heading instead for the little town of
Odendaalstroom, which he intended to take and to cross the river near there. As a result, the general had led a large force to head him off and had left that very morning.

Which way to go? It did not take Fonthill long to decide. His place was with his own column, so he hired a Kaffir to take him directly to Zanddrift. It was a risk, because he knew that two other Boer commandos, under General Kritzinger and Judge Hertzog, had previously penetrated the Colony and were now ranging deeply into the mountains that fringed the border. The trail that Hammond had followed at the crossing, therefore, could well be that of the two other commandos. Or would it? Mzingeli – if Hammond was trusting him to lead, that is – would never follow old spoors. The thought decided him. He would cross at Zanddrift.

There, he found the recent marks of many riders going down to the fast-flowing Orange but the water level was low and, dismissing his guide, he crossed with comparative ease, despite some initial apprehension about guiding his horse with only one hand in the swift-flowing water. On the other side, he realised that the terrain was now much more inhospitable, with barren hills rising to the south in a jumbled mass. How was he to track the column? He looked about him. What would Mzingeli do? Look for softer ground, of course.

He turned to the left and, sure enough, as the ground close to the river turned marshy, there he picked up again the traces of many horsemen. In addition, however, he noted the marks of several wagons and what could only be heavy guns. The Boers, of course!

His own column included no wagon or artillery piece, but there was no way of knowing if the hundreds of hoof marks included
those of his own men. He frowned. Better to follow the tracks of the commando, anyway. If Hammond was doing his job, then wherever were the Boers, Fonthill’s Horse should be close in attendance.

He followed the clearly distinguishable signs of a commando on the march for a couple of hours until it began to rain again, so he resolved to camp for the night. He did not wish to blunder into de Wet’s rearguard again – and this time on his own. Fonthill therefore tethered his horse, unpacked an oilskin, some cold biltong and dry biscuits – better not attempt to light a fire – and curled up miserably under a low tree. He eventually drifted off to sleep, lulled by rain dripping from the leaves and dreamt that Alice was walking hand in hand with Fulton and looking over her shoulder, laughing at him.

He awoke with a start to realise that someone
was
laughing at him. A rifle barrel was poked in his ribs and an Afrikaan voice jeered, ‘Come on, Khaki. Time to stop dreaming and get on your feet.’ Three Boers – dressed untidily in half-buttoned British army tunics, but Boers all the same, judging by their unkempt beards and slung bandoliers – were looking down at him and grinning.

Damn! Simon threw aside the oilskin and rose unsteadily to his feet, slipping his wounded arm back into its sling.

‘Ah, wounded, eh?’ The Boer with the rifle still at his ribs frowned. ‘Where did you get that, then? And what are you doing out here, with a wounded arm?’

‘I cut myself shaving,’ said Fonthill coolly. ‘And I was just taking some exercise in your lovely sunshine.’ He gestured upwards to where the rain now seemed to have increased in intensity.

‘Don’t joke with us, English.’ The Boer leader was now scowling. Then he looked closer at the badges of rank on Simon’s jacket and
turned with a grin to his fellows. ‘Ah, friends. We have captured a full colonel. What a catch. Come on. We take him to the general.’

Ah. The general! Fonthill’s mind raced. Would that mean de Wet, or one of the other commando’s leaders? If it was de Wet he must follow closely the direction in which he was taken so that, if he could escape, he could bring the column quickly up to the attack. But that must be his plan of action whatever the camp to which he was taken. His hopes were quickly ended, however, for one of the burghers produced a black handkerchief and tied it tightly across his eyes.

‘You don’t see where we take you, Colonel,’ he said. ‘And if you try to gallop off, we shoot you. Understand?’

Simon nodded. There was nowhere to gallop to, anyway.

They rode for little less than half an hour and Fonthill realised that he must have laid down to rest infuriatingly close to the enemy’s camp. What now? He knew that the commandos rarely kept prisoners, for they were only an impediment to them in their
fast-moving
strikes. When retained, however, they did have a reputation for treating them well – or as well as their own stringent rations and living conditions allowed – before releasing them on the open veldt. Would they, however, keep a colonel? His capture could be a modest propaganda coup for them. He remembered how much the Boers had made of capturing Winston Churchill, that scion of English nobility, earlier in the war. But that was then and this was now. These commandos probably had no time for propaganda. They were just hard fighters, living from hand to mouth – and without proper clothing, judging by the uniforms these three were wearing. Or was this another example of the ‘dirty warfare’ tactics they were said to be practising, using captured uniforms as disguise to creep
up to unsuspecting English outposts? Ah well. All would soon be revealed.

He could tell by the noise surrounding him that the little party had entered the Boer camp. He was helped down from his mount, although the cloth was kept tightly bound round his eyes, and then led to where he could smell woodsmoke and, deliciously, the smell of coffee.

After being kept waiting for perhaps five minutes he heard an interchange of conversation in Afrikaans before the blindfold was removed. He blinked and stared into a familiar face, with its high cheekbones, hard eyes and neatly cut beard. ‘Good morning, General de Wet,’ he said.

A slow smile crept across the Boer’s weather-beaten face. ‘Ah, Mr Fonthill. I see that you didn’t stay a civilian long. A colonel now, then. And you have been chasing me. By golly, you have. Obviously annoyed because I took your horses. Though you got them back soon enough, eh? Come and sit down. Would you like some coffee?’

‘Thank you. I certainly would.’

The general squatted on the ground next to the fire and beckoned to Fonthill to sit beside him. ‘This coffee is foul,’ he said, ‘because, thanks to you, we can’t get proper grains now. So we make it from old bedsocks and God knows what. Here, try it.’

Simon took a sip and wrinkled his face. ‘General,’ he said, ‘if I had to fight on coffee like this I would have surrendered months ago.’

‘Ach, man. It will take more than bad coffee to make us give in. Now, tell me, Colonel. Where is your column exactly? I know it is not far away looking for us. But I know you weren’t leading it because I have scouts out behind us. What on earth were you doing out here,
with your arm in a sling, all on your own?’ Without waiting for a reply, de Wet shouted out a string of orders in Afrikaans, clearly giving instructions for the camp to break up and move on.

Fonthill decided that it would be pointless to dissemble. He told de Wet of his wound, his trip to Pretoria for medical treatment and his anxiety to join his column. ‘So you see, General, like you, I was looking for my column.’

De Wet did not reply immediately and instead barked out a series of further instructions, clearly not happy with the pace of the inspanning. Simon took advantage of this to look around him carefully. This commando was huge, bigger by the look of it than those they had encountered already: perhaps sixteen hundred to two thousand horsemen. They were manoeuvring several large Krupps cannon into place behind oxen – ah, and he thought they had captured all de Wet’s artillery at Bothaville! – and the difficulty of doing so was the cause of the general’s annoyance.

But it was the Boers themselves that most aroused Fonthill’s interest. The few he had seen in his previous encounters with them were not as badly clothed, primitively shod nor as gaunt in appearance as these men now. Many wore only roughly cut hide sandals on their feet, or went barefoot. Their original farming clothes, where worn, hung in tatters and many, like the patrol that had captured him, wore badly fitting British army tunics and breeches. He also observed that many carried captured Lee Enfield rifles or British carbines to complement their Mausers. This was a rag-tailed army if ever there was one.

De Wet caught his eye. ‘Not smart, eh, Colonel? But, by God, we can still fight. Because we fight for our country, you see. Now, will you give me your word as an English gentleman,’ he allowed himself
a steely smile at the phrase, ‘that what you have just told me is the truth? As you can see, we are moving out anyway, so whatever you say, we will not be waiting here for your column or my old friend General Knox.’

‘Yes, General. I give you my word that what I have just told you is the truth.’

‘Good. I believe you. Now, we must take you with us while I decide what to do with you. We have taken recently to stripping our prisoners of their clothing – not because we wish to punish them, but because, as you can see, living on commando means hard riding and we need to wear what we capture.’

Fonthill nodded. ‘The word is, General, that you have broken the terms of the Hague Convention by wearing our uniforms to give you an advantage in attacking.’

De Wet shook his head vigorously. ‘Not true. We wear your clothes to stop us getting … what is the English word? Ah yes. Pneumonia.’ He chuckled for a brief moment and then his face lapsed back into a seamed expression of fierce purpose. ‘We don’t care what you say. But speaking of this Hague thing. Is not your burning of farms and putting our women and children behind barbed wire breaking the terms of that? Eh?’

Fonthill frowned in return. ‘I do not approve of that either—’ He was interrupted by de Wet who spoke sharply to him in Afrikaans and then interpreted.

‘I am sorry. I speak my language. I forget. I said that I had heard that you have burnt farms, too, but that you have been kind to the families. We appreciate that.’

Simon marvelled at the intelligence that carried these details across
the veldt so quickly to the fighters at the front. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘But I understand why Roberts and Kitchener were driven to do it. They had to cut off your supply of relief horses, food and drink – the supplies that kept you out on the veldt raiding our railway lines, lines of supply and townships. Your method of fighting, General, is a difficult one to combat. You know that. So more … er … unconventional methods had to be introduced to stop you.’

‘Well. They do not stop us. But they make us angry. Very angry. We now invade the Cape Colony – and there are other commandos down here, on this side of the border, to raise rebellion here. It could end the war in our favour. We shall see.’

Fonthill shook his head sadly. ‘No it won’t, General. We just have too many men for you. You are vastly outnumbered and outgunned. You ought to stop the slaughter now and negotiate. Kitchener will listen. He is not Milner.’

De Wet stood, his face like thunder. ‘On your feet, English,’ he said. ‘We move out. The war goes on.’

Fonthill stood. His horse, rifle, bandolier and revolver, of course, had all been taken from him but he was not bound in any way – probably because of his wounded arm – and no immediate guard was put on him. Everyone was busy around him and he remembered what Captain Steele had told him about the speed with which the Boers inspanned. Here, they were
running
between their tasks of dismantling their bivouac tents, untethering the horses, harnessing the oxen and manhandling the cannon into place.