The Last Horseman (12 page)

The men quickly recovered, laughing among themselves at their fear. Corin unhooked his fiddle from his saddle strap and played a few bars of a jaunty jig in celebration.

‘Put it away, Corin,’ Maguire told him. ‘There’s men lying dead on the ground. Do ya think it matters that they’re British? Their womenfolk’ll be grieving as much as ours would grieve for us. Let’s not forget that.’

Chastised, the younger man secured the fiddle, then followed the others from the killing ground.

He would never admit it to the brother who had cared for him for most of his life, but this unyielding land, an anvil beaten by the sun, made his heart yearn for the mist-laden hills and green fields of Ireland.

This was a war that would snatch even more men into its madness and inflict its pain and suffering without favour.

Ireland was a very long way away.

*

Since the war began the British had suffered defeats that had shocked those at home. The so-called ragtag army of Boers had been underestimated. These were superb horsemen and marksmen, fast and manoeuvrable, whose German weapons made them even more deadly. The Mauser rifles and Krupp artillery slew many a British soldier sent into a damnable battle by generals who had not yet rid themselves of outdated formations used against a lightly armed indigenous population across the Empire.

Infighting and rivalry among the generals fuelled the British defeats. Napoleon had believed that no one general should lead an army and after the British were slaughtered at Spion Kop, Colenso and Magersfontein there were those in the British Cabinet Defence Committee who agreed. The British sent Field Marshal Lord Roberts as General Officer Commanding South Africa. ‘Uncle Bob’ had saved India for the Empire, had lost a son at Colenso and was determined that his generals should reverse their failures. Roberts gave himself a fighting force greater than those of his generals who faced tougher odds. Forty thousand men, a hundred artillery pieces and a cavalry division struck into the Orange Free State, sister republic to the Transvaal – the spiritual homes of the Boers. At a cost. The British were exhausted. Poor planning and Roberts’s lack of understanding of how his supply lines could remain intact meant his troops suffered twenty-four hours without food or water and officers and men bravely cast away their lives to even more reckless plans. The Boers, vastly outnumbered, dug in tenaciously on the east and north-west of the Modder River and launched an audacious attack, seizing the whole south-east line from the British. Roberts almost ordered his men to retire from the field, a fatal mistake that would have allowed thousands of Boers to escape. The cost had been too high, but the gods of war saved him when the Boers surrendered. The British artillery had slaughtered most of their horses, and without them the commandos lost their fighting strength. Nigh on four thousand Boers surrendered.

What became known as the Battle of Paardeberg was the first great victory of the war. Roberts had won almost by default but the casualties from that battle were in plain sight at Naauwpoort; this was an important railway junction, but it was only a strip of corrugated iron houses on each side of the railway line. It was here that many of the wounded were brought from the battle that had been waged, and served as the principal base hospital of Lord Roberts’s advance.

The British dead and the dying were laid to one side of the railway siding. Flies smothered the wounded but the corpses were being buried as quickly as possible to avoid the spread of disease. A forlorn crop of graves rose up from the arid land and men with shattered limbs, pierced lungs and broken bodies clung to life in appalling conditions. Soldiers lay suffering in stoic silence, regional accents from town and country blending into words of comfort for each other until those in greatest need fell silent, and the hard land claimed them.

The distant sound of a steam train reached these men, offering hope of evacuation that lifted their spirits. The Red Cross hospital trains would run from the Cape to the battlefield hospitals and take the wounded on the first leg of their journey home. God’s gift, the men thought. Clean sheets and a food sack of fruit, milk and eggs. Linen bags, stencilled in red: the Good Hope and Red Cross Societies had clean clothes and soap, a shaving block and toiletries. It was the human face of war and a welcome relief to the desperate. Walking wounded edged towards the platform’s edge. Was the train slowing? No comforting words from the Indian stretcher-bearers were uttered, no orders were received. They cursed. This was a troop train going up the line to help ‘Uncle Bob’ beat the
boojers.
There was no fucking train for them. Those that could watched the distant speck get larger, its pennant of black plumed smoke heralding its approach. Good luck to those poor bastards then, they muttered. Rather them than us.

*

The Royal Irish Regiment of Foot had landed in Cape Town days earlier: their first sight of the great curving bay was the three-thousand-foot Table Mountain buttressing a spine of peaks raking back to another coast and another ocean. A formidable symbol that seemed to warn those who disembarked not to venture any further. The Irish came ashore from their ship as did other regiments from theirs.

A dozen ships had unloaded men, supplies and horses. It had been an arduous journey at times on overcrowded ships and insanitary conditions and men died from dysentery. A vicious head wind across the Bay of Biscay had confined soldiers below decks despite their desperation to go topside and suck in the cold air. Anything was better than the stench of vomit below. But rough seas threatened to take men over the side and their lives were cast in misery for another two days.

By the time the ships reached Tenerife where they took on water and coal they had their sea legs. Some foolishness was had four days later when they crossed the equator and Mulraney had been blessed with a ducking by King Neptune, an embarrassed Sergeant McCory wearing a wig –
like a whore on the high seas
–
quipped Flynn, which earned him extra duties, but then, as the churning ships ploughed their way southwards to St Helena, the men were obliged to strip and clean weapons with unremitting regularity by their NCOs. Had deck space been sufficient, RSM Thornton would have had them drilling; small mercies were few but that was a blessing, though there was to be no escape from a fitness regime that had groups of men stretching, bending and running on the spot.

With fair winds and mostly clear skies the small flotilla sailed close enough for each regiment’s band to be heard. Bagpipes and flutes from the Scots’ vessels made the Irish music, with their tin whistles, bugles and paper and comb, seem modest by comparison. Seven days after they lost sight of the island they arrived in Cape Town where hundreds of steamers, brilliantly illuminated with their electric lights, lay at anchor in the bay.

With kitbags slung the men were shuffled into order, squared away as neat and tidy as a soldier’s footlocker, and then they were marched off to camp. The three-week voyage was softened by their first night in Green Point Camp, an expanse of flatland a short march from the docks, where bivouacs nestled beneath the heights of the mountain and Signal Hill. Troops were entertained with sentimental songs from home by Cape Aberdonians, which suited the Scottish regiments, but was met with heckling from those Irish who had arrived with the latest contingent. Inter-regimental rivalry was good for morale but insulting the Aberdonians from the Cape was considered bad manners. Regimental Sergeant Major Thornton threatened punishment, which quietened them, but Colonel Baxter and his officers secretly lauded their men’s disregard. They would need even greater disdain for their enemy in the following months.

The comfort of camp was short-lived, however. Next morning they were marched to the city, waiting in ranks to cross the broad thoroughfare as electric tramcars rumbled their way between foreshore and city. Cape Town train station was packed with waiting soldiers, who were issued with a hundred rounds of ammunition per man and then herded into cattle trucks.
Welcome to South Africa
, one of the Cape Afrikaner railway workers had shouted in English as their train pulled away.
Now fuck off home.

The trains lumbered continually from Cape Town station and docks, hauling not only new recruits but also veterans of Indian and Sudanese campaigns across the South African veld. This was yet another war to hold the Empire together, and Great Britain’s war machine had swung into its efficient role of supplying men, provisions and equipment to the front line several hundred miles to the north. British troops were already engaged with their enemy in the harsh conditions, learning even harsher lessons from the Mauser rifles of the Boer ‘farmers’. It was now widely reported that the British and colonial forces were suffering heavy casualties from battle and illness. But the Irish press concentrated on two elements of the conflict. Irish regiments were beginning to lock horns with the Foreign Brigade, made up of volunteers from Europe and Ireland, but most specifically they were facing Irishmen from the Irish Transvaal Brigade. The Irish Republicans who years earlier had flocked to the goldfields of Johannesburg now gathered themselves into a force to be reckoned with, having seen the ideal opportunity to fight the British Army and, by consequence, the Irishmen who served in it. But the Royal Irish Regiment of Foot was not yet in conflict with the enemy, be they the Foreign Brigade or the thousands-strong Boer Republic’s army.

The train carrying Baxter’s battalion rolled along its narrow three-gauge track that made the carriages swing and sway across a landscape of dreary sameness. Flat-topped hills and mountains stood bare, treeless, without even scrub bush to soften their rugged outlines. For two days and nights of mind-numbing monotony they travelled towards the border of the Cape Colony whose Afrikaners had yet to decide whether to throw off the British yoke and join the war or to stay neutral. Some had volunteered for the British and thus torn their families apart. As loyalties hardened this wretched war would squeeze blood from stone.

*

The Royal Irish troop train rattled past Naauwpoort. It was a sobering sight for the Irish as the train slowed. More than eight hundred sick and wounded men were quartered there.

‘So they’re just sheep farmers, these Dutchies, are they?’ quipped Mulraney. ‘They’ve given Uncle Bob a shearing, that’s for sure.’

Soot billowed backwards from the engine, and Flynn spat the black grit from his mouth. ‘And if I don’t start seeing a blade of grass or a tree soon enough I’m transferring to the Mounted Infantry. This is no place for a foot soldier. What the feck is a man supposed to take cover behind?’

‘You and you bloody horses,’ said O’Mara, a Liverpudlian Irishman. ‘Jeezus, you can shovel their shit but you’d break your fucking neck just trying to climb into the saddle.’

‘O’Mara’s right, Flynn. You’d look like a sack of shite on a nag,’ Mulraney added.

‘Aye, well, I’d have a better chance of outrunning a
boojer
’s bullet if I was clinging to a nag’s neck, not like these poor bastards, blind and lame.’

Mulraney stuck a cigarette between his lips, balanced himself as he lit it and gazed across the bleak horizon. ‘One of the fellas at the camp said it doesn’t rain for nine months of the year, parched to buggery it is, like this, then it pisses down and all this red soil gets covered with a carpet of grass and flowers.’

Flynn took the cigarette from his fingers and drew in a lungful of smoke. ‘Fuck the flowers, that red dirt is probably our lads’ blood, that’s what brings the buggers into bloom.’

Mulraney took back his cigarette. ‘And when you take a bullet up the arse I’ll wager a bloody great thorny cactus’ll grow.’

They laughed, gripping the sides of the swaying truck, but the shattered bodies of the wounded they passed were a sobering sight. Better to die quick than have yourself ripped apart by shot and shell. Better yet was to kill the bastard enemy first.

Craggy mountain ranges and sun-baked plains seared their own peculiar harsh beauty into every soldier’s dust-gritted eyes near the border of the Orange Free State and Natal Province. The dust caught the back of Lieutenant Baxter’s throat. The damned horizon seemed so distant, though he knew it to be no more than three miles away. Or so his training had always told him. Had anyone ever sent a man to the horizon and measured it? Like many things he expected the information to be vaguely accurate. The best way to judge distance was to locate an enemy and watch his shots fall. How many thousand yards for various guns, how deadly the rapid-fire pom-pom would be. A weapon that the British Army had decided not to purchase, but which the Boers had seized on with glee. When would he ever get to test himself? Jumbled questions flitted through his mind.

He discarded what was left of his cigarette and shifted in the saddle to watch the company of Royal Irish go about their work. He had expected a more glorious war, despite the fact the army was fighting irregular troops who had the advantage of knowing the desolate landscape. And what they were doing now was far from damned glorious. It was downright shameful. The Irish troops in particular carried memories and a history of their own countrymen being forcibly removed from their land. And here they were burning out Boer homesteads and imprisoning their women and children. Baxter sat grim-faced on his horse as his men put the dirt farmer’s stone and sod-roofed house to the torch.

‘Not exactly giving the enemy a good thrashing, would you say, lieutenant?’ Flynn said to Baxter as the wife and four grimy-faced children of various ages were eased away from their burning home and put on a flatbed wagon hitched to oxen. The woman cursed at the men in her guttural language. Their cow was tethered, the family’s half-full sack of corn confiscated.

‘Our orders are to deny the enemy any safe refuge, no place to rest, nowhere to resupply,’ the lieutenant answered, without allowing his true feelings to show. ‘Shoot the cow, Flynn.’