Sunset at Sheba

Copyright © 1960, 2001 John Harris

ISBN 0-7551-0224-X

This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.

Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

When the Great War broke out in Europe on 4 August, 1914, the new Union of South Africa, formed out of the old defeated Boer Republics of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal, and the English colonies of Cape Province and Natal, found itself threatened in the West by the enemy colony of German South-West Africa.

To many of the Boer South Africans, many of them leaders of great distinction in the war of 1899-1902, this immediately seemed an opportunity to recoup their losses and regain a free and independent country. Men like Generals Beyers, De la Rey and Christian de Wet, leaders of great skill in the earlier war, were vigorous and still active, but thrust by defeat and the passing of years among their memories.

Like Napoleon and his marshals before the Hundred Days, they were still smarting under the not-far-distant collapse of their armies; and though many of them had tried to settle in peace, they had too recently been in arms against Britain and the transition in 1914 from the role of enemy to that of champion was too violent. Egged on by the young and the hotheads, they felt they could cleanse their hearts of the corroding bitterness.

De la Rey was very soon removed from the scene. Driving through Johannesburg on 15 September, with Beyers, his car was shot at in mistake for that of a gang of bank-robber-murderers, for whom, by sheer coincidence, the police had thrown a cordon round the city, and De la Rey was killed instantly.

Beyers and De Wet managed eventually to get the rebellion going in the Western Transvaal and the Northern Free State; and Jan Smuts and Botha, the Prime Minister of the Union, former Boer leaders who had remained loyal to the new state, were obliged to take the field against their old comrades.

This is not a story about De Wet or Beyers, or about Smuts or Botha. With the exception of an obvious few, the characters are all imaginary. The military units - apart from those of Botha and his commanders - are also imaginary.

It is a story about minor fictitious events after the beginning of the rebellion and before its collapse, which culminated in an incident that became known as the Battle at Sheba.

It began in Plummerton West, a thriving little town set in the wide hot plain in the south-western corner of the Transvaal, not far from the borders of the Orange Free State, an ugly little place which up to then had always been too busy with gold to bother about beauty.

In spite of the few imposing buildings which had sprung up, many of the streets were still, in 1914, unpaved and edged with board walks and not far behind busy Theophilus Street, the main thoroughfare, sparse faded grass still grew in front of most of the houses. For Plummerton West, less than thirty years before, had been nothing more than a sleepy supply depot for the farms of the scattered Boers who scratched a meagre living from the thin soil of the veld, a huddle of mud and stone buildings which overnight had become a jumping-off spot for the gold fields of the district.

But from the day the first bright stone had been kicked by accident through the grass, men had come in their hundreds - on foot and on mules, in carts and in coaches, even on bicycles and in hansom cabs, from Johannesburg and Kimberley and the Cape -- Dutch Boers who’d abandoned their farms at the prospect of quick money, sugar planters from Natal, ex-officers from the Cape garrison who’d resigned their commissions in the hope of a fortune, Germans from the South-West, Portuguese from Delagoa Bay, Americans from the Rocky Mountains, French, Spanish, Dutch, Australians, Canadians and Englishmen. The sun-scorched veld round the tiny dorp had become crowded first with tents and wagons and then with flat-faced wooden buildings whose iron-roofed verandas stretched over the board walk.

The place had been called originally Madurodorp, after some dusty Boer farmer who had halted his wagon there on the way north, then in the hectic days of the gold find, when it had been populated by a flamboyant crowd of enthusiastic men, it had gloried briefly in the name of Shotgun Camp. In the ‘nineties, when you could no longer drop a springbok just off the end of the main street, the bank had arrived, and an hotel or two had sprung up, and its name had been taken from that of Theophilus Plummer, the man who had done most to make it respectable, the man who had changed it from a camp to a town and given it some vestige of law and order; and just before the Boer War, when it had gloried in a brief but unsuccessful siege, it had begun for all time to be known by the prosaic and ugly name of Plummerton West.

The name was there on the front of the biggest hotel the place could boast, a brick and stone building with a new rococo Victorian facade -
Plummerton Hotel,
the first thing you saw. It seemed, in fact, to be on every alternate building in the town -
Plummer’s Livery Stable, Plummer’s Store,
the bank, the offices of the
Plummerton Building Company,
the imposing edifice of the
Plummerton and District Estate and Mining Corporation,
the newspaper, everything - for its owner had contrived to make a fortune for himself also in the building of the crude and ugly parody of a town that had spread, raucous and noisy, farther out into the veld than its original dusty founder ever dreamed about.

Now, in 1914, though the market-place had been paved and a branch line ran from the railway junction at Plummerton Sidings, its twin town to the south, the place had still not quite made the transition from brick and tin, and the ugly little dwellings of the last century were still there among the neo-Gothic edifices which the business houses were beginning to thrust up. And in the same way, the primitive emotions which had been there when the first brick was laid on the bare veld were still not far below the surface. In the essentials, Plummerton West was still the same raucous little town it had been twenty years before. The land was the same land and the air still had the same heady atmosphere of adventure.

The sun climbed higher, grew fiercer and seemed to glow in the brassy sky; and the land lay boldly bright and blistering in the sun. The red dust was deep in the roadway for there were still long spans of oxen in the town heading through from Plummerton Sidings, shuffling up the suffocating clouds that powdered black men and white alike to a bright yellow-red.

The road was shimmering and the heat intense. The dust seemed to edge along with a man as he walked so that he drew it in with every breath he took, and the oxen, the horses and the mules that still outnumbered the motor vehicles in the streets had rings and lines on their faces where the moisture from their eyes, nostrils and mouths had caught the dust and turned it to mud. The heat was above, below, around, and a thousand glistening surfaces mirrored back the intensity of the sun’s merciless rays. The air above the town moved in wavering lines, and the new concrete of the Standard Bank of South Africa stood out gleaming white like old bones in the sun.

In spite of the early hour, the streets were already crowded when the little cavalcade came in from the north-east. Everybody seemed to be busy arguing about the war in Europe and the news of the rebellion in the North, and nobody noticed them arrive at first. There were five of them in two cars - a white man and two Kaffir servants in a battered Vauxhall with a shining brass bonnet, and two more white men setting the pace in a big yellow Daimler.

They came into Plummerton at a rush, not slowing down, confidently expecting the passers-by to look after themselves as they hurried down Theophilus Street, the new pneumatic tyres humming over the wooden blocks of the newly-paved main thoroughfare. The crowd scattered and shouted good-natured imprecations after them as they roared in, pumping the rubber bulbs of their horns; and a small black piccaninny was snatched just in time from under the wheels of the Vauxhall by a white man in a straw boater and guillotining collar, and sent screaming to its mother with the palm of his horny hand at its bare behind.

The little cavalcade slid to a stop with locked rear wheels in a whirl of dust in front of the Plummerton Hotel, and a crowd began to gather immediately, their eyes on the fancy Daimler with its brass-edged mudguards, for it was a vehicle which had never been seen in Plummerton West before. Its yellow spokes, brass lamps and bright tan leatherwork put it in a class by itself, and the word sped up and down Theophilus Street that someone important had arrived.

At once, heads appeared in the windows of the offices on either side of the hotel. The manager of the branch office of the Standard Bank of South Africa, with its green-glazed windows and brass plate, appeared at his door and started talking to the lawyer from the adjacent office, which bore his name in blue and white enamel over the list of insurance and mining implement manufacturing companies he represented. Then people began to emerge in ones and twos and groups from the store, the mining consultant’s rooms and the newspaper office, which huddled together, flat-faced and dusty, round the hotel, indicating by clear inference where the first, the very first, business of the town had always been done.

There was a pause while the dust settled, then the party from the cars began to descend to the sidewalk, the white man in the Vauxhall first, stiff-legged from too much sitting.

He was greeted from the steps of the hotel by a man in military uniform who had obviously been waiting for them, a handsome man in his fifties, with thick black hair and moustache just turning grey, his keen brown eyes staring out of a sharp military face, a dark fierce soldier whose restlessness sat on him with the same easy distinction as his uniform.

The man from the Vauxhall, plump and spectacled and awesomely respectable in the noisy crowd which was gathering, nodded and lit a cigar, slapping from his clothes the dust which had insinuated itself into the tonneau of the car round the square, upright windscreen, and the isinglass side curtains. The driver of the Daimler - a tall slender boy with a high aristocratic nose - waited for one of the Africans to open the door before he climbed out, rubbing and flexing his stiff fingers and shaking the leather coat he wore. The circular motoring goggles on his forehead, which rested on a narrow cap worn horizontally over his eyes, gave him the look of some strange monster with a flat head and great round eyes.

His passenger was the last to step on to the sidewalk and all the rest of them waited respectfully for him as the African removed the rug from his knees, all of them hanging back from the steps of the hotel to let him pass up them first.

As he stood knocking the dust from the folds of his clothes, he seemed bigger than all the rest of them together, not only because of his bulk which was considerable but because of his confidence, his obvious wealth, his clear expectation of respect. He was tall as well as broad and still not old, with a florid face and a yellow moustache just beginning to turn grey. His light grey suit had never been created within miles of Plummerton West or even Johannesburg, and a few idlers moved up the street eyeing him curiously as he stretched himself, staring with pale pop eyes at a faded notice set behind glass by the steps of the hotel, a relic of the days when the town had been responsible for its own destiny during the long-forgotten Kaffir wars.

It was in gaudy red and black, the ink still smudged where clumsy fingers had first set it up on a wall in the urgency of a crisis thirty years before.

Wanted,
it read,
Volunteers for the Front, and for Colonel Makepeace’s Grand Attack on Chief Jeremiah’s Town. Loot and Booty Money. Better Prospects than the Diggings. Same Rations as a General. Enrol now at the Plummerton Hotel, before it is too late.

It was dated 1884 and signed
Hector Stark Kitto
in a bold flourishing hand that seemed to indicate that the owner of such a resounding name felt inevitably destined for immortality.

The big man stared at it, still dusting his clothes, watched all the time by the others.

‘Not seen one of those for a long time,’ he said shortly to the soldier on the steps, jerking a plump white hand at the notice.

‘Turned up a few weeks ago,’ he was told. ‘They thought it ought to be displayed. Bit of history.’

The big man nodded. ‘Makes you feel old suddenly,’ he said.

For a moment nobody spoke, then the big man slapped his leg with his gloves and headed up the steps, trudging heavily as though his weight were just beginning to be a burden. As he climbed, the auctioneer from the office down the street, called by an excited clerk, put his head out of the doorway, stared at the crowd, then emerged in his entirety, followed by an arguing client whom he was obviously brushing aside in search of more important business, and as the big man and his followers vanished from sight, he broke into a run, still followed by his client, and headed for the hotel bar.