1999 - Ladysmith Read Online Free PDF Page B

used it for making tea, and for washing their hair once a week. Three brothers washing their hair before going to the Red Lion on a Friday. The image made him feel homesick. Still, snap time soon, he thought; half a pint of beer and some corned beef hash on a tin plate would do very nicely…
    The Biographer took the opportunity of having brought out his equipment to take a covert shot of the showering men, and another of General Buller, climbing up on to a skylight to escape the deluge of the deck-swabbing.
    “You can catch me if you can, but I won’t pose for you,” the General called down to the cameraman, as he balanced on the sloping glass. “Not up here, at any rate.”
    Afterwards, a common sailor asked him to come down, so that he could wash the skylight too.
    “Now you wouldn’t wash me off, would you?” Buller chuckled, and then jumped down on to the slippery deck. For an oldish man, he kept his footing very well.
    A little later, a gong called the inner circle to the Captain’s dining saloon. There was more music inside, where a band played popular airs as the diners took their seats. The conversation, the Biographer discovered on his own uncomfortable entrance, was at first exclusively political.
    He soon became aware that the members of the General’s inner circle were far more blase about the outcome of the war than the ordinary soldier. The General’s staff, presenting themselves as a band of stout-hearted experts, seemed to think the war would be over very swiftly.
    Of the correspondents, only Atkins would countenance any sense of the justification of the Boer cause. “It is, after all, their land,” he said, as the waiters brought in a great silver tureen of mulligatawny. John the Baptist, the Biographer thought, as they lifted off the round lid—as large as Buller’s head—and started ladling it. “Well, there are the natives…” he ventured nervously.
    Silence fell over the table, and the Biographer’s long, pointed nose descended towards his soup plate. There was an awful moment in which the clank of cutlery was all that could be heard. Idiot, the Biographer thought.
    “Oh my goodness,” called out an aide-de-camp, eventually. “Someone’s invited a kaffir-lover to the Captain’s table. If we’d known you were of that stamp, we wouldn’t have asked you.”
    “He’ll learn, I guess,” said Churchill. “He’s the new photographic chappie, everyone. So keep on your toes and mind your tongues, lest he creep up on you with his camera and show you in an unfavourable light.”
    The Biographer’s nose descended further, like that of a dog which has been firmly admonished, and he felt cravenly thankful for Churchill’s remark, condescending as it was. At least it let him off having to explain himself.
    But the incident was soon forgotten, as the conversation moved on. “They are both inferior races, anyhow,” someone else said. “Boers and natives. What was it Milner said? The ultimate end is a self-governing white community.”
    “Supported by well-treated and justly governed black labour from Cape Town to the Zambesi,” picked up another. “But that mean Boers, too.”
    Milner: there was a justice of the peace called that in Birmingham, the Biographer remembered. But this one, the Cape Governor, was a real jingo, responsible for pushing the Boers over the brink.
    “Milner told Asquith you just have to screw Kruger, sacrifice the nigger completely and the game is easy,” shouted one of the swells.
    The Biographer wished he was elsewhere. These people, these colonels and aides-de-camp, these Major Pole-Carews and Lord Gerards, these civil servants and silver-tongued correspondents, even genial old Rigby, the Dunottar Castle’s captain—they were like another breed. Even the way they held their bodies was different. Look at Churchill now, for instance, listening as another one of them blathered on. Even when he wasn’t the centre of attention, he had a patronizing air, a