Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (681 page)

“Jan — Jan,” said one young man appealingly, “don’t make mock of us.”

“I thought that was what you wanted so badly. No? Then listen to me. Behind us the grazing is bad. We have too many cattle here.” (They had been stolen from farmers who had been heard to express fears of defeat.) “Tomorrow, by the sky’s look, it will blow a good wind. So, to-morrow early I shall send all our cattle north to the new grazing. That will make a great dust for the English to see from their helio yonder.” He pointed to a winking nightlamp stabbing the darkness with orders to an outlying picket. “With the cattle we will send all our women. Yes, all the women and the wagons we can spare, and the lame ponies and the broken carts we took from Andersen’s farm. That will make a big dust — the dust of our retreat. Do you see?”

They saw and approved, and said so.

“Good. There are many men here who want to go home to their wives. I shall let thirty of them away for a week. Men who wish to do this will speak to me to-night.” (This meant that Jan needed money, and furlough would be granted on strictly business lines.) “These men will look after the cattle and see that they make a great dust for a long way. They will run about behind the cattle showing their guns, too. So
that
, if the wind blows well, will be our retreat. The cattle will feed beyond Koopman’s Kop.”

“No good water there,” growled a farmer who knew that section. “Better go on to Zwartpan. It is always sweet at Zwartpan.”

The commando discussed the point for twenty minutes. It was much more serious than shooting rooineks. Then Jan went on:

“When the rooineks see our retreat they may all come into our kopjes together. If so, good. But it is tempting God to expect such a favour.
I
think they will first send some men to scout.” He grinned broadly, twisting the English word. “Almighty! To scoot! They have none of that new sort of rooinek that they used at Sunnyside.” (Jan meant an incomprehensible animal from a place called Australia across the Southern seas who played what they knew of the war-game to kill.) “They have only some Mounted Infantry,” — again he used the English words. “They were once a Red jacket regiment, so their scoots will stand up bravely to be shot at.”

“Good — good, we will shoot them,” said a youngster from Stellenbosch, who had come up on free pass as a Capetown excursionist just before the war to a farm on the border, where his aunt was taking care of his horse and rifle.

“But if you shoot their scoots I will sjambok you myself,” said Jan, amid roars of laughter. “We must let them
all
come into the kopjes to look for us; and I pray God will not allow any of us to be tempted to shoot them. They will cross the ford in front of their camp. They will come along the road — so!” He imitated with ponderous arms the Army style of riding. “They will trot up the road this way and that way” — here he snaked his hard finger in the dust — between kopjes, till they come here, where they can see the plain and all our cattle going away. Then they will
all
come in close together. Perhaps they will even fix their bayonets.
We
shall be up here behind the rock — there and there.” He pointed to two flat-topped kopjes, one on either side of the road, some eight hundred yards away. “That is our place. We will go there before sunrise. Remember we must be careful to let the very last of the rooineks pass before we begin shooting. They will come along a little careful at first. But we do not shoot. Then they will see our fires and the fresh horse-dung, so they will know we have gone on. They will run together and talk and point and shout in this nice open place. Then we begin shooting them from above.”

“Yes, uncle, but if the scoots see nothing and there are no shots and we let them go back quite quiet, they will think it was a trick. Perhaps the main body may never come here at all. Even rooineks learn in time — and so we may lose even the scoots.”

“I have thought of that too,” said Jan, with slow contempt, as the Stellenbosch boy delivered his shot. “If you had been
my
son I should have sjamboked you more when you were a youngster. I shall put
you
and four or five more on the Nek [the pass], where the road comes from their camp into these kopjes. You go there before it is light. Let the scoots pass in or I will sjambok you myself. When the scoots come back after seeing nothing here, then you may shoot them, but not till they have passed the Nek and are on the straight road back to their camp again. Do you understand? Repeat what I have said, so that I shall know.”

The youth obediently repeated his orders.

“Kill their officers if you can. If not, no great matter, because the scoots will run to camp with the news that our kopjes are empty. Their helio-station will see your party trying to hold the Nek so hard — and all that time they will see our dust out yonder, and they will think you are the rear-guard, and they will think
we
are escaping. They will be angry.”

“Yes — yes, uncle, we see,” from a dozen elderly voices.

“But this calf does not. Be silent! They will shoot at you, Niclaus, on the Nek, because they will think you are to cover our getting away. They will shell the Nek. They will miss. You will then ride away. All the rooineks will come after you, hot and in a hurry — perhaps, even, with their cannon. They will pass our fires and our fresh horse-dung. They will come here as their scoots came. They will see the plain so full of our dust. They will say, ‘The scoots spoke truth. It is a full retreat.’
Then
we up there on the rocks will shoot, and it will be like the fight at Stormberg in daytime. Do you understand
now
?”

Those of the commando directly interested lit new pipes and discussed the matter in detail till midnight.

Next morning the operations began with, if one may borrow the language of some official despatches — ”the precision of well-oiled machinery.”

The helio-station reported the dust of the wagons and the movements of armed men in full flight across the plain beyond the kopjes. A Colonel, newly appointed from England, by reason of his seniority, sent forth a dozen Mounted Infantry under command of a Captain. Till a month ago they had been drilled by a cavalry instructor, who taught them “shock” tactics to the music of trumpets. They knew how to advance in echelon of squadrons, by cat’s cradle of troops, in quarter column of stable-litter, how to trot, to gallop, and above all to charge. They knew how to sit their horses unremittingly, so that at the day’s end they might boast how many hours they had been in the saddle without relief, and they learned to rejoice in the clatter and stamp of a troop moving as such, and therefore audible five miles away.

They trotted out two and two along the farm road, that trailed lazily through the wind-driven dust; across the half-dried ford to a nek between low stony hills leading into the debatable land. (Vrooman of Emmaus from his neatly bushed hole noted that one man carried a sporting LeeEnfield rifle with a short fore-end. Vrooman of Emmaus argued that the owner of it was the officer to be killed on his return, and went to sleep.) They saw nothing except a small flock of sheep and a Kaffir herdsman who spoke broken English with curious fluency. He had heard that the Boers had decided to retreat on account of their sick and wounded. The Captain in charge of the detachment turned to look at the helio-station four miles away. “Hurry up,” said the dazzling flash. “Retreat apparently continues, but suggest you make sure. Quick.”

“Ye-es,” said the Captain, a shade bitterly, as he wiped the sweat from a sun-skinned nose. “You want me to come back and report all clear. If anything happens it will be my fault. If they get away it will be my fault for disregarding the signal. I love officers who suggest and advise, and want to make their reputations in twenty minutes.”

“‘Don’t see much ‘ere, sir,” said the sergeant, scanning the bare cup of the hollow where a dust-devil danced alone.

“No? We’ll go on.”

“If we get among these steep ‘ills we lose touch of the ‘elio.”

“Very likely. Trot.”

The rounded mounds grew to spiked kopjes, heart-breaking to climb under a hot sun at four thousand feet above sea level. This is where the scouts found their spurs peculiarly useful.

Jan van Staden had thoughtfully allowed the invading force a front of two rifle-shots or four thousand yards, and they kept a thousand yards within his estimate. Ten men strung over two miles feel that they have explored all the round earth.

They saw stony slopes combing over in scrub, narrow valleys clothed with stone, low ridges of splintered stone, and tufts of brittle-stemmed bush. An irritating wind, split up by many rocky barriers, cuffed them over the ears and slapped them in the face at every turn. They came upon an abandoned camp fire, a little fresh horse-dung, and an empty ammunition-box splintered up for firewood, an old boot, and a stale bandage.

A few hundred yards farther along the road a battered Mauser had been thrown into a bush. The glimmer of its barrel drew the scouts from the hillside, and here the road after passing between two flat-topped kopjes entered a valley nearly half a mile wide, rose slightly, and over the nek of a ridge gave clear view across the windy plain northward.

“They’re on the dead run, for sure,” said a trooper. “Here’s their fires and their litter and their guns, and that’s where they’re bolting to.” He pointed over the ridge to the bellying dust cloud a mile long. A vulture high overhead flickered down, steadied herself, and hung motionless.

“See!” said Jan van Staden from the rocks above the road, to his waiting commando. “It turns like a well-oiled wheel. They look where they need not look, but
here
, where they should look on both sides, they look at our retreat — straight before them. It is tempting our people too much. I pray God no one will shoot them.”

“That’s about the size of it,” said the Captain, rubbing the dust from his binoculars. “Boers on the run. I expect they find their main line of retreat to the north is threatened. We’ll get back and tell the camp.” He wheeled his pony and his eye traversed the flat-topped kopje commanding the road. The stones at its edge seemed to be piled with less than Nature’s carelessness.

“That ‘ud be a dashed ugly place if it were occupied — and that other one, too. Those rocks aren’t five hundred yards from the road, either of ‘em. Hold on, sergeant, I’ll light a pipe.” He bent over the bowl, and above his lighted match squinted at the kopje. A stone, a small roundish brown boulder on the lip of another one, seemed to move very slightly. The short hairs of his neck grated his collar. “I’ll have another squint at their retreat,” he cried to the sergeant, astonished at the steadiness of his own voice. He swept the plain, and, wheeling, let the glass rest for a moment on the kopje’s top. One cranny between the rocks was pinkish, where blue sky should have shown. His men, dotted down the valley, sat heavily on their horses — it never occurred to them to dismount. He could hear the squeak of the leathers as a man shifted. An impatient gust blew through the valley and rattled the bushes. On all sides the expectant hills stood still under the pale blue.

“And we passed within a quarter of a mile of ‘em! We’re done!” The thumping heart slowed down, and the Captain began to think clearly — so clearly that the thoughts seemed solid things. “It’s Pretoria gaol for us all. Perhaps that man’s only a look-out, though. We’ll have to bolt! And I led ‘em into it! . . . You fool,” said his other self, above the beat of the blood in his eardrums. “If they could snipe you all from up there, why haven’t they begun already? Because you’re the bait for the rest of the attack. They don’t want you
now
. You’re to go back and bring up the others to be killed. Go back! Don’t detach a man or they’ll suspect. Go back all together. Tell the sergeant you’re going. Some of them up there will understand English. Tell it aloud! Then back you go with the news — the real news.”

“The country’s all clear, sergeant,” he shouted. “We’ll go back and tell the Colonel.” With an idiotic giggle he added, “It’s a good road for guns, don’t you think?”

“Hear you that?” said Jan van Staden, gripping a burgher’s arm. “God is on our side to-day. They
will
bring their little cannons after all!”

“Go easy. No good bucketing the horses to pieces. We’ll need ‘em for the pursuit later,” said the Captain. “Hullo, there’s a vulture! How far would you make him?”

“Can’t tell, sir, in this dry air.”

The bird swooped towards the second flattopped kopje, but suddenly shivered sideways, and wheeled off again, followed intently by the Captain’s glance.

“And that kopje’s simply full of ‘em, too,” he said, flushing. “Perfectly confident they are, that we’d take this road — and then they’ll scupper the whole boiling of us! They’ll let us through to fetch up the others. But I mustn’t let ‘em know we know. By Jove, they do
not
think much of us! ‘Don’t blame ‘em.”

The cunning of the trap did not impress him until later.

Down the track jolted a dozen well-equipped men, laughing and talking — a mark to make a pious burgher’s mouth water. Thrice had their Captain explicitly said that they were to march easy, so a trooper began to hum a tune that he had picked up in Capetown streets:

Vat jou goet en trek, Ferriera,
Vat jou goet en trek;
Jannie met de hoepel bein, Ferriera,
Jannie met de hoepel bein!