1999 - Ladysmith by Giles Foden Page B

something halfway between interest and resentment in their eyes. Nevinson met their gaze momentarily, then looked down and continued his journey.
    “The last train has gone,” he told Steevens, on entering.
    The hero of the Mail —balding and bespectacled, though scarcely thirty—was sitting writing at the kitchen table.
    “So we’re stuck here then,” he said, removing his glasses. Small, brown-eyed, white-faced, he didn’t seem the war correspondent type, but his confidence under fire—and in print—was already legendary.
    “Looks like it.”
    “Beleaguered.”
    “Well, let’s see how it goes,” said Nevinson. “Place for the story, though. Although Burleigh seems to think otherwise—he’s gone, MacDonald tells me.”
    “Has he? The bugger. When I send my next despatch I’ll put him down as missing in action. That’ll ginger up the boys in the Telegraph offices.”
    Steevens got up, walked over to the window and looked out—into darkness, for in the few seconds since Nevinson had entered the room, night had fallen in its quick, tropical way, like a heavy curtain at the theatre. Steevens’s torso was marked out against the blackness of the pane.
    “Beyond is the world,” he declaimed, “…under the wide and starry sky.”
    He turned round, and leaned against the windowsill, his stiff white collars contrasting brightly with the black glass. “I used to watch the sky in the Sudan, of a night. Glorious, the open desert.”
    “Rather refreshing, I should think,” said Nevinson, taking a seat at the table.
    “Yes. It didn’t attack the nerves, being on campaign, like this place does. Well, until Omdurman, when the death toll was too much for one to entertain any thought but that of the grave. The bombardment, it did the job, but by Christ…Heads without faces, faces without anything below, and black skins grilled to crackling.”
    Nevinson paused, thinking about what Steevens had said. Eventually, he spoke. “Will it come to that here, do you think? If they bring Kitchener over to help Buller? There’s rumours of it.”
    “Let’s hope they don’t need to. Anyway, this is different. A white man’s war. I wonder how long it will last, though.”
    “They say Buller will be here in a week or two. But I’m not so certain.”
    “Nor I,” said Steevens. He hit the window sill with the side of his hand. “What irks me about all this is how unnecessary it all is. The swaggering figure of Universal Trade is the man with his finger on the trigger, and yet no one is saying it.”
    “I take it you mean the gold-bugs,” said Nevinson, who was already aware of Steevens’s Radical sympathies—despite his working for a Tory halfpenny paper, where such political inclinations, not to mention literary ones, were held in contempt.
    “Indeed. Milner, Rhodes, even Chamberlain is culpable to some degree. They are all after the gold and diamond fields really, and to my mind that makes the whole thing stink. Blood shouldn’t be spilt for such things.”
    Steevens certainly had passion, thought Nevinson, even if he didn’t think it crucial to a victorious military campaign. Maybe it was that which had brought him recognition at such a young age. Exciting books about India and the Sudan campaign, incisive reports from America and the ranks of the Turks at Thessaly…What was the title of that one, With the Conquering Turk? …Nevinson had been on that campaign too, on the other side, but he hadn’t heard Steevens’s name in those days. He ought to have done. Head boy at his school, fellow of his college, Steevens had left both behind and swept Fleet Street before him. Nevinson felt a twinge of jealousy; he had worked in journalism for a decade longer. But there was, it was true, a brilliant austerity about Steevens’s writing: by picking out the right details, he gave you a very powerful picture of a scene, making you feel as if you were there.
    “What’s this then?” Nevinson said, looking down at the