1999 - Ladysmith by Giles Foden Read Free Book Online Page A

cunning he was proving to be. Creeping down mountain passes from the two republics, the Boers’ three columns now controlled most of northern Natal. Joubert himself had come by Laing’s Nek. Although both Charlestown and Newcastle had been captured, there had been little serious action, as the British residents had mainly already left. What had taken place was mostly bloodless—some police and a passenger train captured. The worrying thing was how well supplied the Boers appeared to be, especially with Krupp artillery, which was reported to come with skilled German gunners supplied by the factory. More worrying still was the speed of the advance: at this rate Brother Boer would be in Durban within the month.
    So far as the inhabitants of Ladysmith were concerned, the point was that a large number of Boers, perhaps twenty-five thousand organized into commandos, had massed within fifteen miles of the town. The outposts of both the Carbineers and the 5 th Lancers had been engaged on successive nights, and heavy firing was beginning to be heard in the distance. People were saying that the first real shots of the war had been fired at nearby Dundee, to where a column had been rashly thrown forward. This was under Perm Symons, the impetuous man in charge of forces in Natal until the arrival of Generals White and—if he ever would arrive—Buller, with his Army Corps.
    Other noises than those first shots at Dundee had maintained an air of normality in Ladysmith itself, albeit normality of a rather infernal character: the other day the band of the Leicesters had played scales all morning. Slow time, Nevinson had observed. That was the awful thing: the whole place was just waiting for the Boers to come on. Not surprisingly, this feeling of dreadful anticipation had given rise to suspicion. The few Dutch left in the town had been arrested, and now the military police were rounding up suspicious characters. This seemed pointless to Nevinson: most of them were simply refugees displaced by the war, mine-hands and uitlander servants down from Johannesburg.
    He rubbed his face—the sun had brought out a rash—and made a note to himself to get a hat with a wider brim. Below him, the dipping slope which the kopje crowned was swaying its tall grasses with a hypnotic motion, and for a second it seemed that the emptiness he saw, still further below on the plain itself, was nothing but a mirage.
    It had all changed so quickly, testament to fear as much as to military necessity. Before, the lines of white bell tents had been busy with activity. Pickets with fixed bayonets had kept guard, and mounted patrols skirted the perimeter. Men had played cards, cleaned their kit, smoked their pipes. Yesterday they had dismantled the camp, it being deemed impossible to defend, and moved into town. Wagons had stirred up great clouds of dust, and kit had lain revealed on the ground, ready to be packed up. Now it was nearly all gone, and the tents were being repitched beside the river.
    He looked out over the sun-scorched, stone-freckled plain again. It wasn’t vast enough to be a desert, but the bare expanse he could see created that impression: freedom, space, a kind of totality that was also crushing. It absorbed one ineluctably, drawing the eye towards the infinite. As Steevens had said, of coming up on the train, “You arrive and arrive, and once more you arrive—and once more you see the same vast nothing you are coming from.” Here all was gaunt and wild, as the Cape, with its Dutch gardens, had been cultivated and picturesque; how far away those dark greens and purples seemed today, as if situated in an altogether different realm. For now, without the soldiers, the plain was truly desolate. There was only dust, litter, a few goats browsing, and—he noted in his glass—the occasional African poking about in the debris.
    It was with this pitiful sight in mind that Nevinson packed up his belongings, remounted, and made his way back to town. At