Give Us This Day (27 page)

He saw the “sir” as an accolade, a singularly graceful compliment from a professional to an amateur. It brought him more satisfaction than any victory in the sports arena. They shook hands and Cookham passed the word along to give covering fire at rapid rate the moment Hugo left cover. Then, with a single prodigious leap, he was off, bounding down the slope and swerving at every obstacle in his path—dead men, dead horses, jettisoned equipment, loose rocks, everything between him and the brown surface of the beaten path over which they had ridden not half-an-hour since.

He had no awareness of being a target on the way down. His concentration was centred wholly on his swerves and leaps and the placing of feet encumbered by heavy cavalry boots. Then he was running south, faster it seemed than over any straight stretch to the tape. Once on the level, he heard the impact of individual Mauser bullets striking the rocks in his path, but none struck him and gradually the fusillade reverted to the odd whining plop as a spent bullet ricocheted into the slab-sided hillside to his left.

He came upon Murchison’s rearward picquet behind an outcrop on the Boer side of the path, a little short of the distance estimated by Cookham, for he had run, at a guess, a little over half-a-mile from the point where he reached level ground. A man stood up and called, making a trumpet of his hands, and he changed direction, breasting a slight slope and leaping the low parapet into a shallow depression where a few dismounted lancers were huddled, commanded, it seemed, by a middle-aged trooper. He said, between laboured breaths, “Thirty survivors still holding out a mile back. Orders from Lieutenant Cookham in command. Boers occupying high ground on this side of the valley. Mr. Cookham says to find Major Murchison and tell him to send cavalry and guns behind the range to cut ‘em off.”

“There’s a Boer outpost overlooking that track, sir. That’s why we daren’t move back.”

Hugo thought, glumly, He’s waiting for orders, for a direct order, and there’s no on
e else to give it. He said, “Take all three troopers. One of you will make it if you mov
e fast. Give me your carbine and a bandolier. I’ll climb higher and try to pin them down for a spell. I’ll wait until they’re firing on you before I move.”

The man was an old sweat, conditioned by years of service to rely on an officer, even a volunteer. He called his three men by name, telling them briefly they were to make a run for it, one at a time. Anyone who got through was to pass the order on to Major Murchison. Then, his confidence restored, he turned back to Hugo. “Just how far for’ard
is
Captain Montmorency, sir?”

“Captain Montmorency is dead. Lieutenant Cookham’s commanding all that’s left of the column. Tell them that, too, if you make it.”

“Can they hold out long, sir?”

“Indefinitely. But the Boers will pull out by the time reinforcements move up. Get going, man.”

The man handed over his carbine and unslung his bandolier. “There’s around twenty cartridges, sir. Good luck, sir.”

“You too,” Hugo said, and watched as, one by one, the four of them leaped from cover and ran a zig-zag course down the track. The old campaigner went last, in less of a hurry than the others and taking full advantage of the overhang of scrub this side of the path. One man fell but picked himself up again, and Hugo had no chance to watch their further progress, for he had to turn his back on them to scale the tumble of rocks screening him from the snipers’ outpost on the crest.

The hill here was a series of small fissures and easily scaleable, partly on account of its milder gradient, but also because every cleft was sown with a prickly, toughstemmed growth sprouting leaves not unlike the umbrella plants that grew down by the ox-bow below Tryst. He went up very carefully, hugging the slope, for the crackle of shots from above and a short distance to the left, told him the Boers posted immediately above the fork were still trying to pot the troopers as they made their way to the rear.

He had expected to find the summit of the spur open ground, with no cover worth mentioning, but as soon as he reached it he saw that he was wrong. For some reason there was more scrub on this side of the valley and the umbrella-like plants had straggled all the way up a donga that might, at one time, have been a tiny watercourse. There was no advantage in him making his way along the ridge as far as the outpost snipers. Sooner or later—probably the moment they saw a sizeable body take the left hand branch at the fork behind the Boer position—they would withdraw, moving at the double all the way along the crest to warn the main body. He realised the logic of Cookham’s assumptions.
Damn it
, he thought,
that kid has more brains than Montmorency. If he’d been commanding the column, we should never have run our necks into the noose like this
, and he opened the lowest pouch of his bandolier and found there five bullets, enough to fill the half-empty magazine of the carbine.

The sun was blisteringly hot and he lacked the protection of his helmet. By raising himself to his knees, he could just see the track down which he had run, two dead horses marking the southern limit of the battle and the seam where Cookham’s survivors were still holding out judging by the occasional burst of fire from one side or the other. He could have seen a good deal more had he stood upright, but the tallest umbrella only grew to a height of about two feet, and if his presence here was so much as suspected, all his trouble would have gone for nothing. The outpost party would fan out and fire at him from several angles, rushing him if they failed to hit him because they would see a warning to the main body as worth the sacrifice of some of them. So he lay very still, carbine thrown forward and ear to the ground, listening for the scrape of a boot and trying to calculate how many Boers he would have to deal with. Presently, however, the outpost’s rifles fell silent. Either they had accounted for the troopers or had reverted to their task of watching the ox-path a hundred feet below where Murchison or base reinforcements would soon be beginning the outflanking movement.

About twenty minutes passed in almost complete silence to the north and south, the cessation of fire implying that the main body to the north had already begun their withdrawal towards Stormberg. Then, quite close at hand, he heard guttural voices and the chink of metal on loose stones, but although the voices seemed to be approaching he could see no movement in the scrub when he raised his head above the cluster of parchment-like leaves at the top of the donga. He had just lowered it again when he heard someone shout an order in an urgent tone, and in the same second he saw his first man, a grey-bearded, thickset Boer, with a slouch hat and his rifle held at the trail, moving at a crouching run immediately to his front and already less than thirty yards from where he lay. He raised himself on one knee and took a snap shot, with no pretence of aiming, and the man stopped in his tracks, his legs set widely apart and his free hand stretched out, as though to ward off the bullet.

He remained in that curiously rigid position long enough for Hugo to get an unforgettable glimpse of his expression. Not so much startled as abstracted, the expression of a man who, quitting his front gate for work, suddenly remembers something he should have done before slamming the door. Then, quite slowly, the Boer toppled sideways, his rifle dropping soundlessly into the scrub, his body falling away down the incline out of sight and sound as it rolled down the western slope of the hill, and at that precise moment his following companion showed, hatless, beardless, and with Mauser in firing position. The face behind the levelled rifle was that of a boy, fourteen or younger.

He was obviously firing blind, for his shot went wide by yards and he had no time to work his bolt and press the trigger a second time. Hugo’s second slug hit him squarely in the chest so that he staggered backwards, dropping his rifle and pressing his hands to the point of impact. Then he fell flat on his back in a small open patch so that Hugo, peering through the stalks, could see the upturned soles of his hobnailed boots.

A long silence followed, unbroken by the staccato crackle of fire higher up the valley, or by a rustle or boot-scrape further along the spur. The sun, now directly overhead, scourged his neck and sweat dripped in his eyes, blurring the sight of the upturned boots in a grey-green haze that undulated like a curtain in a draught.

The shot from the right and below almost did for him, ripping through the rucked-up folds of his shirt and cutting the shoulder strap of his bandolier so that it fell free and would have bounced into the donga had he not made a grab at it. He swung half-right and fired twice but whether he hit anything or not he had no means of knowing, for at that moment a fourth Boer fired from the left, the bullet coming close enough to slice the scrub six inches from his nose.

He had to take a gamble then on whether there was a fifth or sixth Boer somewhere behind the dead boy, for there was better cover there in the form of a spur of rock. Once he was behind it, the marksmen on the lower terraces would be in his sights. He half-rose to his feet, dashed forward, and was within a yard of it, his left foot braced on the outflung arm of the boy’s corpse, when his head exploded like a rocket, painlessly yet with a kind of deliberate wrenching movement that stretched every nerve and muscle in his body.

* * *

He was still breathing when they found him, sprawled half across a spur of rock at the very summit of the ridge, with the dead boy touching his foot and the other man he had shot some ten yards lower down the western slope of the hill. Kneeling over him, the stretcher-bearers debated among themselves whether or not it was worth their pains to carry him down to the ambulance behind the company of Devons now advancing in open order towards Cookham’s survivors half-a-mile down the valley. On one side of his temples was the familiar small puncture. On the other, exactly opposite, a jagged gash, welling blood. The middle-aged trooper, identifying and reclaiming his carbine and bandolier, decided the matter for them, saying, laconically, “Stop yer gab an’ take the pore bleeder where he can snuff it in shade. But for ‘im that bloody look-out detail woulder made it all the way back an’ give their mates the tip. Looks like he got two of ‘em before they got ‘im.” He moved on, walking upright to the spot about two hundred yards on, where the two other members of the outpost lay, one dead, shot from below at long range, the other holed in the leg and biting on a plug of tobacco while a medical orderly applied splint and bandages to the shattered shinbone. So Hugo’s gamble had been justified in a sense. There could have been no fifth Boer crouched behind that spur of rock, and one more bound would have won him the contest. The stretcher-bearers, grumbling at his weight, worked their way slowly to level ground and the wound was plugged pending closer examination, providing he survived the ride back to the nearest field ambulance tent. Two wounded troopers of the 21st Lancers, salvaged from among the casualties higher up the valley, tried to divert attention from the smart of their own wounds, by having a bet on the issue.

2

Sybil, eldest daughter of the Earl of Uskdale, currently directing her dynamic energy into the administration of the military base hospital at Queenstown, had two public faces. To her intimates, in the enclosed circle in which she had been reared, she was cool, sophisticated, uniquely purposeful, and self-contained. To the public at large, particularly those who devoured bulletins from the war fronts, she was rapidly qualifying for a niche in the pantheon of English heroines alongside Grace Darling, Boadicea, and Florence Nightingale. Both images were too facile to equate with the truth. To a great extent, Sybil Uskdale’s life up to this point had been a masquerade for, contrary to all public and private estimates of her character, she was a complex personality and her positivity concealed a canker of self-doubt.

There was logic in this. Rejecting, instinctively, the social strictures of her times and, more especially, of her class, she had not yet succeeded in filling the vacuum that renunciation implied and was still, in a sense, preoccupied with her quest for a credible alternative. Her obsession with nursing was one aspect of this search, and her acquisition of Hugo Swann as husband was another, her most daring decision up to that time. Both spiritually and physically she yearned for fulfilment in a changing world where the tide was beginning to run against wealth, privilege, and social protocol, and had long since set her face against the purely decorative, submissive role that most well-endowed women accepted with equanimity. But one does not slough off the habits and training of childhood and background at a bound, and there were times, particularly of late, when she questioned not only her ability to fly in the face of convention, but her right to pursue the course she had set herself.

Physically, as a vigorous and exceptionally robust woman of thirty, she had coveted Hugo Swann ever since she saw him stretched out in that committee tent at the Putney fete. But so far the marriage had been oddly frustrating, for she soon decided he was really no more than an overgrown boy, disinclined, unable perhaps, to use her as she longed to be used. Awed by what he obstinately regarded as her social superiority, his demands so far had been faltering and inexperienced, so that she had been forced back on her original resolve, that is to use him as a crutch and fanfare in her drive to develop into what she dimly realised might be a fulfilled woman. He was young and lusty, and there was time enough ahead. But then, before she had time to come to grips with this new situation, the war had engulfed them both and she found herself running a hospital overflowing with maimed and desperately sick men, all of them young and full of promise, each calling to her to be nursed through a personal crisis involving stomach wounds, shattered limbs, devastating facial and head wounds, and, more pitiful still, the ravages of enteric fever, now accounting for three out of every four patients brought in on the hospital trains. In the strain of facing up to her responsibilities, she had almost forgotten Hugo.