1999 - Ladysmith by Giles Foden Read Free Book Online

African one, made of dried cowhide and wattles and good for rapping your assegai on to frighten the enemy, but a Greek or Trojan one. For it had come into Nevinson’s head that he was some classical character—King Priam’s trusted herald Idaeus, perhaps—and the plain of Ladysmith that of Dium.
    Actually, the classical speculation had first been that of Steevens. The Mail –man, who was well read in Greek, had accompanied Nevinson on an earlier visit to the plain. Today, unable to maintain his colleague’s analogy, Nevinson put the idea out of his head. He lowered his glass, musing on how, in these days of ratiocination, analogy was no longer the intellectual power it once had been. The kings of the old time are dead, as a poet friend of his once put it. Now all was facts and evidence. And moving photography. Other members of the press corps in Ladysmith had heard how a representative of the Biograph Company was headed for the Cape with General Buller, and sneered accordingly; but Nevinson had kept his counsel. He could see it had potential, this new art. Or was it a science?
    He secreted his spyglass in the shade of a bare rock, and picked up his notebook. Balancing it on his knee, he began to write. Already, since the invasion and the declaration of martial law, he had filled two booklets with his tidy hand. For the time being, the wire was intact, and from these scribblings he would assemble the atoms of the telegraphs he would send back to his office—via Durban and the cable, passing deep under the sea, up to Zanzibar , Aden, and finally through to London, centre of the known world. But what if the wire was cut? Preparations had been made with carrier pigeons, and a squad of native runners, yet the former could be shot by keen-eyed Boer marksmen and the latter intercepted by sentries and their messages turned open.
    The answer to the problem lay near by, on Signal Hill, where lately the heliograph and flagmen had been working, trying to blink and flap messages in Morse and semaphore to troops at other stations. But so far, in the anteroom of crisis, they had not got through, and weren’t likely to do so until loyal forces were able to fix another heliograph station at Weenen on the Kolombo mountain, thirty-five miles away. In that, as in everything, Nevinson thought, we await General Buller’s grace. It struck him that it was possibly interesting to his readers, this question of how what they were reading was borne unto them, out of a moment of emergency—but it wasn’t the sort of item Major Mott, the military censor, would let him put in a telegraph.
    Nor, though he had done the calculations, would he be able to put in the figures which would no doubt determine the outcome of the whole affair. There were now 13,500 soldiers in the town, about 5,500 civilians and—he made this distinction without hesitation—2,500 native Africans and Indian immigrants. There would have been a lot more of those to feed, had General White not ordered all non-essential servants to be dismissed. Even so, with a total ration demand of around 21,500 mouths, the town could last only about two months. Ignoring, that is, the problem of 12,500 livestock—horses, mules and oxen—for which they had only a month’s forage in store.
    None of this could go in his despatch. But there was plenty of other material to write about. Armoured trains crammed with military stores had been steaming into Ladysmith station all week, filled with compressed beef, compressed forage, jam, oil, sardines, ammunition and more—all the necessities of army supply. Last Wednesday, General White himself had arrived with his entourage. Nevinson had noted how decrepit the man charged with the defence of Natal had seemed: his old riding accident was plaguing him in the heat, making him limp. It didn’t augur well, that gammy leg.
    Neither did the news of the Boer advance, led by the other general, Joubert. “Slim”—cunning—Piet, as he was known. And