The Sound of Thunder (20 page)

Jan Paulus turned to the nearest burghers: Vat hulle weg! Take them away! ” His gesture that accompanied the order was unmistakable.

“We’ll have none of that, sir! ” Acheson glared at him before issuing his own order. “You men, come back and re-form on the Devonshires. Hurry it up, now. Come along. Come along.”

“Hey!” Jan Paulus held up his hand. “These are my .

He groped for the word. “My captures.

“Sir.” Acheson released his grip on Saul’s shoulder, drew himself up to his full height and glared up into Jan Paulus’s face.

“I will give you five minutes to vacate this trench-otherwise you will become my prisoner. Good day to you. ” And he hobbled away through the grass. Jan Paulus stared in disbelief when fifty paces away Acheson turned, folded his arms across his chest, and waited grimly for the expiry of the five minutes.

About him he had gathered a handful of battle-stained soldiers and it was clearly his intention to implement his duty with this pitiful little band. Jan Paulus wanted to laugh with frustration the skinny old goat. But he realized with dismay that most of his prisoners were filtering away and hurrying to join Acheson.

He must do something but what? The whole position was deteriorating into a farce.

“Stop them! ” he shouted at his burghers. “Hold those men they went hands-up. They cannot change their minds now. ” Then abruptly the whole position altered. Over the skyline behind Acheson and his tiny party poured a solid phalanx of fresh khaki-clad figures. The dime battalions of reinforcements sent up from the foot of the mountain by Sir Charles Wan-en had at last arrived. Acheson glanced over his shoulder and saw them swarming forward. The brown parchment of his face tore laterally in a wide and wicked grin.

“Fix bayonets!” he shrieked, and drew his sword. “Buglers sound the charge. Charge, men! Charge!

Hopping and stumbling like a stork with a broken leg, he led them.

Behind him, the glittering crest of a wave, a line of bayonets raced down on the trench. Jan Paulus’s burghers hated naked steel.

There were five hundred of them against two hundred.

They broke and blew away like smoke on a high wind.

Their prisoners ran with them.

Jan Paulus reached the crest and dropped behind a boulder that already sheltered three men.

“Stop them! Here they come!” he panted.

While the British wave slowed and expended itself against the reef of hidden Mousers, while they fell back with the shrapnel scourging them once more-Jan Paulus knew that he would not stand in the British trench again that day.

He could sense the despondency among his burghers. He knew that already the faint-hearted were slipping away to where their ponies waited at the foot of the mountain. He knew with sickened acceptance that he had lost Spion Kop. Oh! The English had paid a heavy price all right, there must be fifteen hundred of their dead and wounded strewn upon the peak, but they had torn a gap in his line. He had lost Spion Kop and through this breach would pour twenty-five thousand men to relieve Ladysmith, and to drive his burghers out of Natal and into the Transvaal. They had lost. It was finished.

John Acheson tried desperately to ignore the agony of his bloated foot, he tried to shut out the shrill chorus of the wounded pleading for water. There was no water on the peak. He turned his gaze away from the trench where men, drugged with exhaustion, oblivious to the thunder of bombardment that still raged about them, lay in sleep upon the bodies of their dead and dying comrades.

He looked instead at the sun, that great, bloody orb lightly screened with long streamers of cloud. In an hour it would be dark-and he knew he had lost. The message he held in his hands admitted it, the grotesque piles of dead men that clogged the trench proved it. He re-read the message with difficulty for his vision jerked and swam giddily.

“If you cannot hold until tomorrow, retire at Your discretion.

Buller. ” “Tomorrow. What would tomorrow bring, if not a repetition of today’s horror? ‘rhey had lost. They were going down from this mountain. They had lost.

He closed his eyes and leaned back against the rough stone of the parapet. A nerve in his eyelid began to twitch insistently, he could not stop it.

How many are there left? Half perhaps. I do not know. Half my men gone, all night I heard their ponies galloping away, and the crack and rumble of their wagons, and I could not hold them.

Jan Paulus stared up at the mountain in the dawn.

“Spion Kop.” He mouthed the name with loathing, but its outline was blurred for his eyes could not focus. They were rimmed with angry red and in each corner was a lump of yellow mucus. His body seemed to have shrunk, dried out like that of an ancient mummy. He slumped wearily in the saddle, every muscle and nerve in his body screamed for rest. To sleep for a while. Oh God, to sleep.

With a dozen of his loyal commandants he had tried all night to staunch the dribble of deserters that was bleeding his army to death.

He had ridden from laager to laager, blustering, pleading, trying to shame them. With many he had succeeded, but with many he had not-and once he had himself been shamed. He remembered the old man with the long white beard straggling from his yellow, wizened face, his eyes glistening with tears in the firelight.

“Three sons I have given you today, Jan Paulus Leroux. My brothers have gone up your accursed mountain to beg for their bodies from the English. Three sons! Three fine sons! What more do you want from me?” From where he sat against the wheel of his wagon the old man struggled to his feet hugging the blanket around his shoulders,

“You call me coward, Leroux. You say I am afraid. ” He stopped and struggled with his breathing, and when he went on his voice was a croak. “I am seventy eight years old and you are the first man to ever call me that if God is merciful you’ll be the last.” He stopped again.

“Seventy-eight years. Seventy-eight! and you call me that!

Look, Leroux. Look well!” He let the blanket fall away and Jan Paulus stiffened in the saddle as he saw the bloody mess of bandages that swathed the old man’s chest. “Tomorrow morning I will be with my sons.

I wait for them now. Write on our grave, L@roux!

Write

“Cowards’ on our grave!” And through the old lips burst a froth of pink bubbles.

Now with red eyes Jan Paulus stared up at the mountain. The lines of fatigue and shame and defeat were etched deep beside his nostrils and around his mouth. When the mists cleared they would see the English on the crest and with half his men he would go back. He touched the pony with his spurs and started him up the slope.

The sun gilded the mountain mist, it swirled golden and began to dissipate.

Faintly on the morning wind he heard the cheering and he frowned.

The English cheer too soon, he thought. Do they think we will not come again? He urged his pony upward, but as it scrambled over loose rock and scree he reeled drunkenly in the saddle and was forced to cling to the pommel.

The volume of cheering mounted, and he peered uncomprehendingly at the crest above him. The skyline was dotted with figures who danced and waved their hats, and suddenly there were voices all around him.

“They’ve gone.”

“The mountain is ours.”

“We’ve won! Praise God, we’ve won. The English have gone. ” Men crowded about his pony, and dragged him from the saddle. He felt his legs buckle under him, but rough hands were there to support him, and half dragging, half carrying him, they bore him up towards the peak.

Jan Paulus sat upon a boulder and watched them harvest the rich crop of battle. He could not sleep yet, not until this was done. He had allowed the English stretcher-bearers to come up his mountain and they were at work along the trench while his own burghers gleaned their dead from along the crest.

Four of them approached Jan Paulus, each holding the domer of a gray woollen blanket as though it were a hammock. They staggered under the load, until they reached the neat line of corpses already laid out on the grass.

“Who knows this man?” one of them called, but there was no reply from the group of silent men who waited with Jan Paulus.

They lifted the body out of the blanket and laid it with the others. One of the burghers who had carried him removed from his clutching, dead fingers a wide Terai hat and placed it over his face.

Then he straightened and asked: “Who claims him?” Unless a friend or a kinsman claimed the corpse it would be buried in a communal grave.

Jan Paulus stood up and walked across to stand over the body.

He lifted the hat and replaced it with the homburg from his own head.

“Ja. I claim him,” he said heavily.

“Is he kin or friend, Oom Paul?”

“He is a friend.”

“What is his name?”

“I do not know his name. He is just a friend.

Saul Friedman fidgeted impatiently. In his eagerness he had arrived half an hour before visiting-time began and for this he was doing penance in the bleak little waiting-room of Greys Hospital. He sat forward on the straight-backed chair, twisted his helmet between his fingers and stared at the large sign on the opposite wall.

“Gentlemen are requested Not to smoke.”

He had asked Ruth to come with him, but she had pleaded a headache. In a sneaking fashion Saul was glad. He knew that her presence would inhibit his reunion with Sean Courtney. He didn’t want polite conversation about the weather and how was he feeling now, and he must come round to dinner some evening. It would have been difficult not to be able to swear if they wanted-it would have been even more difficult in view of Ruths attitude.

Yesterday, the first day of his leave, he had spoken of Sean with enthusiasm. How many times had she visited him? How was he? Did he Did he limp badly? Didn’t Ruth think he was a wonderful person? Twice she replied and, well, no not badly, yes he was very nice. Just about then Saul perceived the truth. Ruth did not like Sean. At first he could hardly believe it. He tried to continue the conversation. But each of her monosyllabic replies confirmed his first suspicion. Of course, she had not said so, but it was so obvious. For some reason she had taken a dislike to Sean which was close to loathing.

Now Saul sat and pondered the reason. He discounted the possibility that Sean had offended her. If that were the case Sean would have received as good as he gave and afterwards Ruth would have related the whole tale with glee and relish.

No, Saul decided, it was something else. Like a swimmer about to dive into icy water, Saul drew a metaphorical deep breath and plunged into the uncharted sea of feminine thought processes. Was Sean’s masculinity so overpowering as to be offensive? Had his attention to her been below average (Ruth was accustomed to extravagant reactions to her beauty)? Could it be that… ? Or, on the other hand, did Sean… ? Saul was floundering heavily when suddenly, as a shipwrecked victim surfacing for the last time finds a tall ship close alongside with lifeboats being lowered from every derrick, the solution came to him.

Ruth was jealous!

Saul leaned back in the chair, astounded at the depth of his own perception.

His lovely, hot-tempered wife was jealous of the friendship between Sean and himself!

Chuckling tenderly, Saul laid plans to appease Ruth. He’d have to be less fulsome in his praises of Sean. He must get them together and in Sean’s presence pay special attention to Ruth.

He must …

Then his thoughts ricocheted off in another direction and he began to think about Ruth. As always when he thought too intensely about her, he experienced a feeling of bemusement similar to what a poor man feels on winning a large lottery.

He had met her at the Johannesburg Turf Club during the big Summer Meeting, and he had fallen in love at a range of fifty paces, so that when he was presented to her, his usually nimble tongue lay like a lutrip of heavy metal in his mouth and he squirmed and was silent. The friendly smile she bestowed upon him licked across his face like a blow torch, heating it until he felt the skin would blister.

That night, alone in his lodging, he planned his campaign. To its conduct he allocated the sum of five hundred guineas, which was exactly half his savings. The following morning he began his intelligence work, and a week later he had collected a massive volume of information.

She was eighteen years old and was on a visit to relations in Johannesburg, a visit scheduled to last a further six weeks. She came from a rich Natal family of brewers and hotel-keepers, but she was an orphan and a ward of her uncle. While in Johannesburg she rode every day, visited the theatre or danced every night with an assortment of escorts, except Fridays when she attended the Old Synagogue in Jeppe Street.

His opening manceuvre was the hire of a horse and he waylaid her as she rode out with her cousin. She did not remember him and would have ridden on, but at last his tongue, which was sharpened by three years of practice at the Johannesburg Bar, came to life. Within two minutes she was laughing and an hour later she invited him back to tea with her relatives.

The following evening he called for her in a splendid carriage and they dined at Candy’s Hotel and went on to the Ballet in company with a party of Saul’s friend.

Two nights later she went with him to the Bar Association Ball and found that he was a superb dancer. Resplendent in brand-new evening dress, with an ugly yet mobile and expressive face, an inch taller than her five feet six, with wit and intelligence that had earned him a wide circle of friends-he was the perfect foil for her own beauty. When he returned her home Ruth had a thoughtful but dreamy look in her eye.

The following day she attended Court and listened to him successfully defend a gentleman accused of assault with intent to do grievous bodily harm. She was impressed by his display and decided that in time he would reach the heights of his profession.

A week later Saul again proved his command of the spoken word in an impassioned declaration of love. His suit was judged and found worthy, and after that it was merely a case of informing the families and sending out the invitations.