1999 - Ladysmith Read Online Free

too, his hair was curious: closely, tightly curled.
    As it happened, it was hair that concerned Mr Kiernan as Bella came up from beneath the bar, not on his own account, but on his daughter’s.
    “What,” he exclaimed, “have you done to yourself? You look like a convict! Who did this? Torres?”
    “Yes,” replied Bella, boldly. “But I asked him to, and it is nothing to do with him. Or you, Father. A lady must wear her hair as she pleases.”
    “A lady? So you’re a lady now, are you?” He seemed, if anything, to be getting redder.
    “I think it’s rather fetching,” said a voice from the bar. Bella—and her father—looked up to see a stocky young trooper, clutching a shilling in his hand. He had green eyes, a biggish nose, and his fingernails were dirty.
    “What you think is not the point,” said Mr Kiernan, glowering. “Come on, what do you want?”
    “I’ll have a gin, if I may.” He smiled at Bella. “Tom Barnes, Green Horse.”
    Like your eyes, Bella said to herself.
    “I’ll deal with you later,” her father said to her, as if he knew her train of thought, “and I’ll please you, sir, not to exchange pleasantries with my staff.” Mr Kiernan pushed the gin across the bar to the soldier, and turned to his daughter, pointing at the floor. “Take that crate of empties down to the cellar. And bring up a full one while you’re about it.”
    “Don’t be hard on her, sir,” Bella heard the soldier say as she went out. He seemed a decent fellow, she thought, as she struggled down the cellar steps with the crate. Though really it would have been better if he had kept quiet.
    The fellow in question returned to his table. Tom Barnes was sitting with four war correspondents. They were quenching their thirst after a tour, having ridden down the Helpmakaar road and stopped for a breather on Pound Plateau. The journalists hadn’t had permission for the scouting expedition and now he had been assigned by the censor’s office to keep an eye on them. This was a lucky chance since it meant he got a night out. Having ignored him at first, they were now—the quartet comprising George Steevens of the Mail , Henry Nevinson of the Daily Chronicle , Donald MacDonald of the Melbourne Argus and William Maud, the Graphic’s ‘special artist’—quizzing him about the army’s readiness for the impending war. In particular, Nevinson—a bearded, elegant character—was worried that the British had pushed up too far from the Cape.
    “Look,” he said, cupping his glass with his hand. “I was up in Pretoria earlier this month. I saw it. The Boers may be ragged and disorganized but they’ve quite simply got more men than us—nearly twice as many. Twenty thousand to our ten. And we don’t know the land so well. They do, and they are full of passion too. I saw their General Joubert when I was up there, and do you know what the first thing he said to me was?”
    “What?” queried Maud, on behalf of all.
    “He said: The heart of my soul is bloody with sorrow.”
    “Typical Boer rhetoric,” sniffed MacDonald, lighting his pipe.
    “No, it’s good,” countered Maud. “I can see it as a caption.”
    “Just for effect,” said MacDonald. “You shouldn’t have been taken in.”
    “On the contrary,” exclaimed Nevinson. “He meant it. Joubert was one of the ones who desperately wanted peace. He feels about this in a way that we don’t, and that passion, conveyed to his troops if it comes to war, could prove dangerous.”
    “Passion doesn’t always win a war,” said Steevens. “Guns and food, that’s what you need.”
    “Oh come on. Passion is necessary too,” said Nevinson. “Absolutely.”
    “Not if you’re an Englishman. There is a simple argument to it. If we win, it will be through brute force and logistics. If they win, it will, as you would say, be through passion. For although I’ve only made a sketchy study of the Boer character, I have learned one thing about that