The Book of War by James Whyle

Author:James Whyle [Whyle, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jacana Media
Published: 2012-01-15T05:00:00+00:00

XV

Patrolling the ravines – A heathen village – Inefficacy of Pelargonium – Dogs – Clearing the plateau – Women as targets – Return to Shining Water Post – Hartung’s coat – A canvas city on the floodplain.

THE DAY WAS SPENT in a war against cold. The belt of wood rung out with the sound of axes as officers and men cut trees and chopped them up and carried them to the fires. The irregulars had few axes and billhooks and they made fires around the trunks of standing trees and when the trunks began to burn through they toppled the trees and carried off smoking branches to pile on the camp fires which flamed up high and roared in the rain.

The irregulars stood about these blazes and their fronts steamed and their backs froze and from time to time they turned around to reverse the processes. When they faced the flames their visages flickered and glowed from the radiance and they stared scowling into the conflagration. They brewed coffee and dipped biscuit into it and gazed into the fire and chewed.

The kid clasped his coffee in his hands.

Could be worse.

How?

The kid thought and then he shrugged.

We could be them.

Heathens.

Yes.

Evans spat and stared about him at the deluge.

Like a cow pissing on a flat rock, he said.

On the day following the troops mustered without bugle call and took their places in silence and stood stamping and shivering in the ruddy light of the fires. At five o’clock they marched south and descended towards the Great Western Ravine by a path into a narrow gorge. In the dawn they marched out of this enclave onto the lower reaches of the valley and then they turned left towards its head. The sound of big guns and small gave notice that the General’s brigade was engaged on the heights. They moved up the valley and the rain stopped and the clouds lifted. They proceeded for some hours and then the irregulars forked to the right up a subsidiary gorge and came upon a hidden village.

They fired the huts and stood about. The Captain took out his eyeglass and saw a group of heathen creeping away on hands and knees through long grasses on a rise across the gorge. He cried out to the Dutchmen and rode out with them and cut the heathen party off. They were armed only with spears and the horsemen hunted them down and shot them at close range in the grasses.

They ascended by a rocky path towards the plateau and their clothes had dried and they sweated as they went. They gained the Kromme tableland and worked their way through the belt of bush at its edge and even the Dutchmen could find no recent spoor. They proceeded across the plain towards the pass onto the northern heights and came to the little basin where they had stopped on their first venture onto the Kromme and bivouacked there and it did not rain.

On the day following they marched before

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