The Last Horseman (20 page)

Pierce extended his hand. ‘Ben Pierce.’

The African clasped it, and half turned his grip so that his palm covered Pierce’s hand a second time. ‘I am Mhlangana.’

Pierce nodded in acknowledgement. Beyond them a constant stream of wounded soldiers were being brought in by Indian stretcher-bearers or by their comrades. Royal Army Medical Corps doctors quickly checked the wounded and indicated where they should be taken. Pierce recognized the voice of one of the men who was pulling a scar-faced soldier from the back of a wagon.

‘Keep bloody still, won’t you? It’s a bullet in your chest not an artillery shell up your arse. Jesus, you’re not gonna die or nothin’,’ Flynn urged his wounded mate. Flynn’s arm was bloodied and he was struggling to get the big man on the ground.

‘Keep our horses in the shade,’ Pierce told Mhlangana and went forward to help.

‘So it’s yourself,’ Flynn said as they lowered the wounded man gently down. ‘I saw Mulraney and he said the American major and his darkie was here, begging your pardon on that, captain.’

Pierce ignored him and pressed Flynn’s hand on to the sucking wound in the man’s chest. ‘Hold him like that, stop the air from escaping, while I turn him over. Don’t let him choke on his own blood,’ he said as he wrapped a dressing around the man and tied it off tightly.

A medical orderly with two African stretcher-bearers pushed Flynn to one side and helped Pierce.

‘He’s still alive,’ the orderly said.

‘He’d better be,’ Flynn said. ‘The bastard owes me money. Why d’you think I broke my back getting him here?’

The scar-faced man was eased on to the stretcher; his eyes fluttered and he weakly gripped Flynn’s arm. ‘Thanks, Flynn,’ he whispered.

‘Scouse, you die on me, you bastard, and I swear I’ll kill you m’self,’ Flynn shouted after him as they carried the wounded man towards the surgeon’s marquee. ‘He’ll be all right. The old
boojers
have Mausers and they use a nice hard-cased bullet. Clean as a whistle. Straight through ya.’

‘That’s very considerate of them,’ Pierce said, eyeing Flynn’s bloodied arm.

‘Aye, well. Not always. Some of the bastards nip the end of their bullets, and Jesus, don’t that make a mess of you?’

‘You’re hurt yourself,’ Pierce said. ‘Here, let me take a look.’

‘It’s nuthin’,’ Flynn said. ‘It’ll give me a breather from that bloody slaughter going on.’

Pierce gently inspected the ragged flesh wound congealed with blood. It looked worse than it was. ‘Let’s get you over to the hospital,’ he said, and then saw his old bone-handled knife tucked into Flynn’s waistband.

*

Radcliffe held the knife as Pierce and Flynn, his arm now dressed, accompanied them across the camp.

‘Flynn here took it off a wounded man they brought down from the line,’ Pierce told him.

‘Is he alive?’ Radcliffe asked.

‘He’s breathin’ but he won’t be needing his tobacco ration for a while,’ Flynn answered.

‘They operated on him an hour ago,’ Pierce said.

The men stood and looked at the hundreds of men laid out in the old buildings and beneath makeshift marquees. ‘Do you know where they took him?’ said Radcliffe.

‘Aye, he’s in one of them horse stalls the captain here broke down.’

Flynn led the way, stepping over men so badly injured they were barely conscious. Radcliffe was amazed that so few cried out or moaned in pain. Laleham was right – these soldiers knew how to suffer. Flies buzzed and settled into blood-soaked dressings; levies removed soldiers who had died, their places immediately taken by more wounded.

There could be no doubt that if Edward Radcliffe had been with any of these men his chances of survival would be slender. Flynn settled next to one of them in the corner of a stall; the others squatted next to him.

‘I’ve come to take you back up the line, Scouse. Sar’nt Major says you’re malingering,’ Flynn said po-faced.

‘Bastard...’ the wounded man muttered and then sighed as a grin broke Flynn’s face.

‘Even so, listen to me, these fellas need some help.’

Radcliffe held the knife: ‘Where did you get this?’ he asked.

The man’s eyes shifted to Flynn.

‘Tell the man, Scouse. You’re in no trouble, I promise ya.’

The wounded man’s breath was ragged: ‘A boy...’

‘Was he a soldier?’ Radcliffe asked.

The man shook his head, and it was obvious that there was little chance of him speaking for long.

‘Was he alive?’ said Radcliffe.

‘Head... Shot... in the head.’ A trickle of blood dribbled from the corner of his mouth. Radcliffe could press him no further despite his anxiety. ‘Dead... Lad was... a goner...’

Radcliffe suppressed the shock that threatened his composure but he involuntarily stepped back from the wounded man. Pierce said nothing, watching his friend assimilate the news like any lawyer taking information into consideration.

‘He’s not dead, Ben. I don’t believe that.’

‘Facts don’t look good, Joseph. He said he took the knife off –’

‘He’s not dead. I’d know if he was. I’d know it,’ Radcliffe insisted. ‘How many men have we seen that we thought dead?’

‘All right,’ Pierce acknowledged. ‘If he wasn’t in uniform then he was probably with the militia and if he survived he might be attached to the Irish,’ he suggested.

‘Were there any irregulars in this fight for the hill?’ Radcliffe asked Flynn.

‘They was out on a flank. Dozens of ’em. Most of ’em recruited from towns along the way. They got the chop from what we could see.’

‘He might be lying out there,’ Pierce said.

Radcliffe turned to Flynn. ‘Can you show us on a map where the Royal Irish positions are?’

‘You’ll need no map, major. Just follow the dead and dying.’

Stretcher-bearers and levies moved among the scattered bodies to the rear of the distant gunfire. Slaughtered horses and mules lay bloated in the day’s heat as walking wounded made their way back to the rail junction ten miles to their rear. It was obvious to both men that most of the badly wounded wouldn’t make it alive. The jolting wagons and rough handling from the bearers, scared of still being in enemy range, would add to their misery on their final journey. The front line was a thousand yards ahead but Boer Mauser fire could still reach the dead and dying if they chose to. That they didn’t, except for the occasional shot that zipped through the air as a lethal reminder, proved that the Boers were more interested in those soldiers still living and who, with what seemed to be an increasingly unlikely miracle, might still attack their positions. The open plateau offered scant cover; soldiers huddled behind anthills and pressed their bodies as low as they could into any undulation in the hard ground, using the shallow craters from the Boer shells. The kopjes rose up, slabs of rock haphazardly tumbled atop each other. The artillery shelling had lessened and Radcliffe realized the enemy must be moving their guns further back behind the rising ground. The Boer sharpshooters would keep the infantry soldiers at bay. The two men tied off their horses on a wheel of a field gun lying on its side, its mules lying dead in their traces. A few paces away was the crater from the enemy’s shell. What remained of the gunners lay scattered. Their officers were experienced men, tough campaign soldiers who’d bought their commissions in the Royal Horse Artillery and fought in the Sudan campaign; they knew what they were doing.

But that meant nothing when you lined up like toy soldiers on a general’s campaign table, thought Radcliffe as he and Pierce weaved through the debris. The guns’ limbers, and the mules and horses that had pulled them, lay ripped and shattered from the Boer bombardment. The haze that settled over the battlefield shifted slightly, exposing another half-dozen slaughtered men and their guns. With parade-ground precision the British Army liked to set up its artillery in neat rows of six in full view of the enemy lines, just to the rear of its own front-line infantry – an easy target for the pinpoint accuracy of Boer gunners.

Rifle fire pinged across the hard ground as Radcliffe and Pierce crouched and ran zigzagging to where they could see soldiers huddled for safety in what was once an animal trail, and which over the years the seasonal heavy rains had widened into a dried-out and eroded watercourse. The donga was the most immediate cover they could both find and they slithered into it as one of the men crouching there cursed them for bringing fire down on to their position.

‘That’s enough!’ Sergeant McCory told the complaining soldier as he scurried along the line to Radcliffe and Pierce. ‘I’ll be damned. You’re a sight for sore eyes, Mr Radcliffe, sir. I don’t suppose you’ve brought any reinforcements with yourself and Mr Pierce?’

‘I doubt there are any to bring, sergeant. You got any men up in the kopje?’

‘Aye, the colonel flanked them with a couple of companies and got into those boulders, among all that undergrowth, but the Boers can see the smoke from their rifles so they’re getting hammered – and we can’t help ’cause the Boers use smokeless cartridges. Just can’t see the buggers.’

‘Where are your officers?’ Radcliffe asked the hollow-eyed sergeant.

‘Dead mostly.’

‘And Lieutenant Baxter?’ Radcliffe queried, hoping that if he had been fortunate enough to find the Royal Irish, then so too would have Edward.

‘I think he’s with C Company down the line. I can’t get a runner across to him.’

‘And the militia?’ Radcliffe asked, hoping that the volunteers would have been kept somewhere in reserve.

‘God knows. They were supposed to outflank them but I doubt the poor bastards ever got through that gap between the kopjes. We’re caught in a crossfire. Our guns to the east are out of range. We were told our cavalry would sort them good and proper. They were supposed to cut the bastards down.’

‘Well, they didn’t, so they can’t help you now. The shooters on that hill can keep you here in this bottleneck for as long as they like unless you root them out of those boulders,’ Pierce told him, looking across to where the Boers hid on the broken hillside.

‘And every time we try, we make fifty yards and we lose more men than we can afford. The colonel’s isolated up there somewhere,’ McCory said, nodding towards the kopje, ‘and we don’t have any field guns left to keep their heads down.’ He nodded towards a wounded soldier behind him, his back wedged against the trench wall, a groundsheet covering him. He looked to be barely old enough to enlist and his ghostly pallor told the men he had lost a lot of blood. ‘He’s all that’s left of them gunners.’ He lifted the groundsheet to expose the man’s shattered leg. ‘We did what we could. It won’t be enough.’

Radcliffe quickly assessed their chances. ‘There’s a three-inch twelve-pounder back there on its side. If you could get a few shells on to their flank, you’d buy yourself enough time to get across this open stretch of ground and on to that hill. Then it’s down to each man and a bayonet,’ he said.

‘Aye, the Dutchies shite their breeches when they see the steel coming at ’em. But we tried to get back to that gun. Once they see us trying for it, they pick my lads off. We tried, Mr Radcliffe, I promise you that.’

Radcliffe looked across the killing zone: it was obvious from the sprawled bodies that men had tried to reach the gun. ‘You can’t stay here and they’ll shred you out there, right enough. There’s some dead ground back there. You get a gun in position they won’t be able to get a shot unless they show themselves.’

As if in answer, a Boer artillery salvo landed less than fifty feet to their front, forcing the men to flinch, crouching into the dirt as the explosion and percussion showered the air with stone and shrapnel.

Radcliffe grabbed McCory’s shoulder: ‘If we can get rounds on them can you get men up there?’

‘If the gun covered our flank we can try,’ the seasoned fighter said.

Radcliffe looked at Pierce and then back to the gun where their horses were tethered. Realization hit Pierce. Radcliffe was going to get them killed.

‘You can outshoot them,’ Radcliffe said. ‘Their Mausers have five-round magazines, your Enfields have ten. Lay a steady fire on them – don’t matter if you can’t see them, just lay it on them. And then get to Lieutenant Baxter. If he’s alive, you need his company with you. Send runners down the line, sergeant.’

‘Jesus, you’re thinking dangerous thoughts,’ Pierce hissed at Radcliffe.

‘We have to risk it,’ Radcliffe answered.

‘The hell we do,’ Pierce replied.

Radcliffe ignored him. ‘Sergeant, rapid independent fire on that hillside for as long as you can. If we make it to that gun we’ll put a couple of shells on them and then you get your men on your feet. Understood?’

‘Yessir. We’ll cover you.’ He turned to the men. ‘All right, lads, listen up...’

‘Do I get a say in this?’ Pierce said, grabbing Radcliffe’s arm, feeling the cancer of fear creep back into him, as if it had never left. ‘Joseph, we’re getting too old to hot-foot it back and get that gun working.’

‘Let’s play the hand we’ve got,’ Radcliffe said.

‘No, let’s not. Let’s wait until dark and then get back to the rail sheds. We can ride our way around this mess.’

A rattle of gunfire splattered close to the donga as if confirming Pierce’s fear that to venture back to the upturned gun was to be torn apart by Boer bullets.

‘Ben, I have to do this. I need to know if my boy is out there. I would never hold anything against you. I’ll do this on my own if I have to.’

‘That gun weighs six hundred pounds, for Christ’s sake. It’s going to take at least half a dozen men to right it. At least. And what do we know about arming the ordnance?’

Radcliffe realized Pierce was right. He shouldered past McCory and held the wounded gunner’s face in his hand. ‘Son,’ he urged him, gently tapping his face. ‘Son, can you hear me? Gunner? Come on, man!’ He slapped the boy’s face harder, and the other soldiers in the trench started to look belligerent at the wounded man’s treatment.

The gunner’s eyes opened and Radcliffe eased a water canteen to his lips. The man nodded his thanks, eyes focused on the civilian.

‘Listen to me, son, I have to get your gun working. What do we do with the ammunition? How do we set it? Can you tell me that?’