Pilgrims Rest by Michael Nicholson

Author:Michael Nicholson [Nicholson, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: apostrophe books, novel, Valley of Gold, South Africa, Boers, Fiction, Zulus, michael nicholson, war correspondent, war reporter
Publisher: Apostrophe Books
Published: 2013-01-21T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

NOT A MONTH PASSED WHEN Major John did not promise Mary that come the next, he would take her to the grave. Huw made a cross with a tiny slouch hat and pipe carved on it. They tried to agree on a verse or line of prayer but nothing seemed to suit his memory. So Huw simply put

WALRUS BAINES LIES HERE

20th JANUARY

1878

BLESS HIS SOUL

But the cross remained in Huw’s workshop, covered in tarpaulin to save it from the dust and flies and the worms that ate everything, and it would be some time and many, many African seasons later before Mary finally got her way and placed it at the head of the pebbled grave on the banks of the Vaalwater River.

There were no travellers now from the Indian Ocean along the Delagoa Road nor the English way from Durban and Mary felt the village was more of an island than ever before. Major John told her of reports coming to him daily of the commotion along the Transvaal’s south-eastern border: the Zulus and their hated enemy the Boers clawing at each other, attacking each other’s farms, stealing each other’s cattle, claiming each other’s land and killing for it.

The English administrators in Pietermaritzburg and Durban dispassionately called it the ‘disputed territories’, a giant tract of land that swept down from the Drakensbergs on their eastern side to the Buffalo and Tugela rivers. A vast land but lacking the well-watered grassy pastures on which both the Boer and Zulu cattle-farmers depended for their survival. But nature, in her even-handed vindictiveness, had infected the grass with lung fever and red-water fever, and the scarce irrigation ran through rocky hills and steep ravines that the cattle could not reach.

Throughout the previous year’s drought Boer and Zulu had fought for the surviving grasslands and for control of the rivers that watered them.

In Natal the Lieutenant-Governor, Sir Henry Bulwer, counselled arbitration though there were many close by him who whispered in his ear that the Boers and the Zulus should be left to fight it out alone until, exhausted and tamed, they fell like ripe pears into Britain’s Colonial lap. But Sir Henry ignored the war-mongering and chose instead to act as honest broker, hoping there was a just and even settlement of the territories which both Boer and the Zulu King Cetshwayo claimed as their own.

Cetshwayo, since his father M’Pande’s death, had kept his peace with the British in Natal at their shared border along the Tugela. Not because he feared them. Among the Zulus fear was unknown. For half a century since Shaka, the creator of the Zulu nation, they had been the greatest and most feared in Africa and it was inconceivable that any other army, even the British, could defeat them. But Cetshwayo had always known that any extended war with the Redcoats and their field guns would leave his own regiments severely mauled, so he was happy that they were not his greatest threat.

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