1999 - Ladysmith by Giles Foden

sufficient to allay any suspicion. He was wise to be wary, however, since the Boers were shooting any African who had worked for the British: already he had seen some twenty killed by firing squad after having been captured at the battle of Elandslaagte, had watched the Xhosas go to bury them where they lay in a heap afterwards. From their appearance, it was clear that many of the dead were also Xhosa, and one man from the hut let out a terrible wail when he saw that a relative was among the corpses. It was a sound that cut Muhle to the core, as he thought about his own family, and where they might be.
    Once during his wanderings, on the morning of a great battle, Muhle encountered his saviour.
    “I have to go and wait for the wounded by the ambulance,” Sterkx said. “Why don’t you come with me? You ought to keep that leg moving.”
    But there were few wounded—few Boer wounded—in that battle, and for most of it the ambulance wagon stood idle. Together they watched, black man and white, from the high hill. On the plain below, men moved like ants, sweeping hither and thither in waves, great clouds of dust and flame spurting up as shells dropped among them. Sterkx let Muhle use his spyglass to watch for a while, and on the ridge beyond the plain (its English name was Nicholson’s Nek) the Zulu saw the Boer sharpshooters creeping on their bellies, and the British soldiers lifting their heads cautiously above their fortifications. Nearly always, a Boer bullet found them. Dead soldiers lay behind every earthwork or pile of rock.
    Sterkx took back his glass and Muhle lay next to him, his crutches at his side. He listened to the Boer’s exclamations— Geluk hoor! Los jou ruiters! —and prayed that wherever they were, Nandi and Wellington weren’t in the middle of it.
    “The English are bringing up their guns,” said Sterkx.
    Muhle looked again, and sure enough the British gunners had limbered up and were riding in a column down towards the main site of battle.
    “Surely they can’t come any closer?” Sterkx said, this time as much to himself as to the Zulu. “They will be cut to pieces.”
    Even without the spyglass, Muhle could see that the column was too close to the hidden lines of Boer riflemen, who lay everywhere in the grass, some with their horses lying quietly next to them, as they had clearly been trained to do. The sixteen-gun column came on. Its horses, by comparison, were nervous and jumped in their traces as the crack of the Mauser bullets grew ever closer. Still they came on, and then the horses began to fall in their own tracks and the column became a jumble as guns and limbers jack-knifed; even from up here, the noise of the bullets striking the gun barrels was audible. It sounded as if a crazed blacksmith were at work down there on the plain. The horses and men around the column—there was no noise as the bullets found these targets—fell into a mess of harness and trace, wheel-spoke and steel. In the face of the onslaught, the column jerked and writhed like a wounded animal, and then, soon enough, lay lifeless.
    “ Almagtig ,” breathed Sterkx. “Almighty God.”
    The Boer riflemen moved forward, swarming over the wrecked gun teams, then moving up the ridge.
    “Now we have got them.”
    Horrified, Muhle watched as the Boers gained ground. Soon, the sound of a bugle was heard and a white flag went up on the other side of the ridge.
    “Come on,” said Sterkx. “We’d better move down. It seems I will be searching for Boer bullets in Englishmen today.”
    An hour or two later, at the bottom of the hill, Muhle watched the British prisoners march in, with dragging steps and downcast faces.
    “They were mostly Irish,” Sterkx told him later, “and will be sent to gaol in Pretoria.”

Nine
    T he capture of more than a thousand prisoners, mostly Dublin Fusiliers, at nearby Nicholson’s Nek, the falling of heavy shells on a number of farms near the town, and the army’s shameful retreat