1999 - Ladysmith Read Online Free Page A

race.”
    “What’s that, then?” said MacDonald.
    “That they are a people hard to arouse, but harder to subdue.”
    Tom Barnes took a drink and looked at the men around him. They all seemed a little foolish. None had yet quite got to grips with the realities of ‘the coming scrap’, as it was now known. From the tiny ration of water from the pumps, the dysentery and enteric, the hot sun beating down on your head or, if you were off duty, the breathless haze of your tent, to the white ants and flies on everything—your food, your tobacco, your writing paper, even your underclothes—it was no picnic. Not to mention the dust in your mouth and in the workings of your fob-watch, or the likelihood of getting shot at by an army of men who never showed themselves and who saw warfare in the same light that they saw hunting antelope. Stalking was the Boer way, the old hands from Majuba said, which was why all the training the British cavalry were doing—charges with lances, for God’s sake—seemed pretty pointless; and all the training the infantry had been doing—marching forward in close order, easy to pick off—totally so. He had tried to describe all this from India in a letter to Perry, his younger brother, once he’d heard that he, too, had signed up and was headed for the Cape: the sheer drudgery of a lot of soldiering—young lieutenants shouting at you or having you flogged, blisters on your feet, boils on your thighs, food not fit for dogs…
    He had the idea that Perry—two years his junior—believed that soldiering was a bit like the ferreting expeditions they had gone in for on the farm when they were younger: an adventure, a lark with a prize, a bloody one to be held up by its hind legs and presented to Ma for skinning when you got home. The fact is, you were more like rabbit on the battlefield than ferret or ferreter. That was what he had said to Lizzie, their sister, in another letter—written on board the Lindula , en route from Princes Dock, Bombay, to Durban—in a last-ditch attempt to get her to persuade Perry to think again. He couldn’t forgive himself the possibility of his younger brother being killed because Perry wanted to imitate him, as he had done all his life.
    Thought of these letters reminded him that he hadn’t written home recently, something he had done religiously in India. There was the voyage to cover, for instance, and the medical and veterinary inspections beforehand. How there had been a case of anthrax at Deolali, and B and C
    Squadrons had had to be left behind. How he himself had had to apply for two replacement horses on the way, one cast from the ship, lame in two feet, the other injured in the train from Durban to Ladysmith, having slipped on the iron floor of the truck after heavy rain.
    He looked about him at the members of the press. They were still talking about passion. It seemed to him—mindful as he was that they were scholars and he was only the son of a farmer—an inappropriate word to describe fighting. He had seen quite a bit (they’d been at Sialkot, in the Punjab), even if it was only against the curly-slippered armies of bedizened maharajas. The Indians didn’t have Mausers, as Brother Boer was known to have, just scimitars and muzzle-loading muskets. Still, he had seen them make some hot wounds in men he had liked to call friends. But passion, no: that word made him think of women. In particular it made him think of the slender, crop-haired girl at the bar. He looked down at his gin. It was half full. That could be quickly remedied.
    Bella saw the young man drain his glass, standing up in the same movement, and moved herself into a position along the bar where he’d necessarily come towards her rather than Jane or, Lord preserve us, their father. She needn’t have bothered. The trooper, his green eyes twinkling, was making a beeline for her. So, unfortunately, was Jane. Her own admirer, Gunner Foster of the Naval Brigade, had returned to his table,