Death's Other Kingdom: Horror Tales of World War I by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Scythian Wolf
Published: 2024-04-08T00:00:00+00:00

It was the beginning of winter, and even in Africa, the desert nights were frigid. Atop his camel, a faint light glowed from inside the Swede’s duster where he engaged a battery to heat the garment via an internal system of wires. The others wrapped bedrolls around their shoulders for warmth. The men rode high on the humps of their camels, their bodies lifted higher than the boughs of the diminishing scrubland trees, so that, in the dark, to any casual observer, they looked like spirits drifting over the groves.

As head drover, Becker goaded their swaying ships of the desert through the night, onward toward the splitting eye of dawn on the sands of the horizon. Without cars or trains, beneath a sky vacant of aeroplanes, no factory within hundreds of miles, sound traveled farther in the desert than a horse could gallop in a day. Soon after the rising sun stung their eyes, from behind the cameleers came sounds like thunder, then cymbals, as first the South African artillery and then their Lewis-gunners lobbed deadly rain on Ritter’s redoubt on the distant escarpment. The riders listened to the firing without comment, knowing that Ritter, once an imperial German, was pressed into the role of a hapless native by the superior cannons of the South Africans, just as the Germans with their Maxim guns had swept aside the knife- and club-wielding Herero, who before them with their knobkieries, steel, and superior bows had taken such lives and lands as they chose from the Khwe, !Kung, !Xun, and other nations of original people now consigned to the desert shadows, living as ghosts in the lands of their ancestors.

The cannons stopped firing around noon, followed by the rifles. Silence came next.

Becker cast a squinty eye at the captain.

“It’s too soon,” Huber said, confirming that the lack of firing behind them could only mean Ritter had failed. “The major needed to hold Botha’s hairy backs off till nightfall. Even with this wind, our tracks are too easy to follow. Can’t you make these camels go faster?”

“They’re camels, Captain. They mostly do what they want. And they’ll be wanting water tonight, regardless of what you’ve heard.”

“Speed them up,” Huber grunted. He prodded his animal with the goad in his right hand to catch up to the Swede. Blue cloth swaddled the scientist’s head, and round glasses with black lenses hid his eyes. “We may have need of your expertise before the day’s out.”

“Of course you will,” the Swede answered. “You’re the military man. Pick the terrain while we still have options.”

“What does the Birkeland cannon need?”

“Slightly higher ground, but more importantly, a way to bunch the enemy together so the target’s no more than thirty meters wide.”

Huber thought back to his pursuit of the Herero over this same terrain a decade prior.

“I know a place.”

Huber signaled Becker and changed direction slightly, an adjustment that turned them south of the trail to the Caprivi Strip and into the unburied past.

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