1999 - Ladysmith Read Online Free PDF Page A

military men…Did they think him effeminate, he wondered? There was a story about a correspondent being debagged by soldiers while covering the war in the Sudan, just because he wore his hair fashionably long. Some of the other correspondents, like Churchill and Atkins, had managed to get themselves a place at the Captain’s table with Buller’s staff, but the Biographer had not been admitted to this inner circle. He suspected it was because his type of journalism was not taken seriously. Some said it was unnatural to fix life’s transitory moments in the way that he did.
    Well, time would tell whose record of Buller’s expedition was the most lasting. Already the Biographer had caught him—General Sir Redvers Buller, VC—on still plates, caught the heavy moustache, the Crombie with a buttonhole of violets, the felt hat, the stolid figure and big, kindly face. He had also made a number of moving Biographs of Buller and his staff, and of various other scenes concerning the Advance Guard’s entrainment for Southampton and embarkation for South Africa. He was particularly proud of a description of the crowds on the platform at Waterloo, civilians and soldiers in a mêlée of uniforms, suits and dresses, all singing and shouting and leaning out of the train windows waving hats, and then, finally—as they’d pulled out with a hoot and a jolt and a puff of steam—what John Atkins had remarked upon, “the long frieze of faces drawn past one’s carriage.” Atkins was the Manchester Guardian correspondent, who was allowed upstairs with the others. A good man.
    To the Biographer’s eye, if not his lens, there had been among those faces many suddenly saddened by an intimation of the greater loss that war might bring. But the grief-stricken ones and the glad, the womenfolk wise and foolish, and the double-chinned Cockney porters leaning on their trolleys—all of them had merged into one as the train picked up speed. The Biographer had been worried that his machine would produce nothing but a blur in trying to record this final part of the scene; but all its mysteries had not yet been revealed, and the answer would not be known until his packet of plates and film reached London and his colleagues at the Biograph Company. Sometimes, in any case, he thought the image came out better when shrouded in gauziness.
    One way or another, he hoped that in that packet would be pictures of the train journey—attempts to catch, as they skimmed past, gleaming pastures and hedgerows full of birds which, like the locomotive’s human cargo, would be in Africa that winter. Pictures, too, of the ordinary soldiers, sat among kitbags and clouds of tobacco. If only he had been able to portray their chat as well, their lively humour and fatalistic cracks. As if to compensate, he had used more film than he need have done, spun it out, just as the train had spun across its ringing web of steel through the down-land and forest of Surrey and Hampshire—to Southampton.
    At Southampton Water the Castle had awaited them, a towering vessel, almost too big for his lens. There was a medieval quality to the scene, one most appropriate to the ship’s white-painted name (over that too his lens had panned). The mass of people and the little boats nosing about under the quay walls had been like traders or importunate beggars on the banks of a moat, the busy gangplank serving as a drawbridge. For a while there had been a stable little world there on the quayside: a large crowd of cheering patriots standing, or perched on roofs and dock-side machinery, singing ‘Rule Britannia’ and ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’. Then the tin trunks and weapons and officers’ valises had gone up, followed by Buller’s stallions, Ironmonger and Biffin, and all the other horses. Finally, the moment for departure had come and, in the month of October at the end of a century, the foghorn had blooped and the great prow had ranged forward.
    He twisted in his canvas chair