The Burning Shore - Smith Wilbur. Страница 52

Lothar had found his father at Magersfontein with his uncle Koos De La Rey, the legendary Boer commander, and had undergone his initiation to battle two days later when the British tried to force the passage through the Magersfontein hills and relieve the siege of Kimberley.

Lothar De La Rey was five days past his fourteenth birthday on the dawn of the battle, and he killed his first Englishman before six that morning. It had been a less difficult target than a hundred springbok and running kudu had offered him before.

Lothar, one of the five hundred picked marksmen, had stood to the parapet of the trench that he had helped dig along the foot of the Magersfontein hills. The idea of digging a trench and using it as cover had at first repelled the Boers, who were essentially horsemen and loved to range fast and wide. Yet General De La Rey had persuaded them to try this new tactic, and the lines of advancing English infantry had walked unsuspectingly on to the trenches in the deceptive early light.

Leading the advance towards where Lothar lay was a powerful, thickset man with flaming red muttonchop whiskers. He strode a dozen paces ahead of the line, his kilts swinging jauntily, a tropical pith helmet set at a rakish angle over one eye and bared sword in his right hand.

At that moment the sun rose over the Magersfontein hills, and its ripe orange light flooded the open, featureless veld. it lit the ranks of advancing highlanders like a stage effect, perfect shooting light, and the Boers had paced out the ranges in front of their trenches and marked them with cairns of stones.

Lothar took his aim on the centre of the Englishman's forehead, but like the men beside him was held by a strange reluctance, for this seemed not much short of murder. Then, almost at its own volition, the Mauser jumped against his shoulder and the crack of the shot seemed to come from very far away. The British officer's helmet sprang from his head and spun end over end. He was driven back a pace and his arms flew open. The sound of the bullet striking the man's skull came back to Lothar, like a ripe watermelon dropped on to a stone floor. The sword flashed in the sunlight as it fell from the soldier's hand, then with a slow, almost elegant pirouette, he sank into the low coarse scrub.

Hundreds of highlanders had lain pinned in front of the trenches all that day. Not a man of them dared lift his head, for the waiting rifles in the trenches a hundred paces from where they lay were wielded by some of the finest marksmen in the world.

The African sun burned the backs of their knees below I the kilts until they swelled, and the skin burst open like over-ripe fruit. The wounded highlanders cried for water and some of the Boers in the trenches threw their water bottles towards them, but they fell short.

Though Lothar had killed fifty men since then, that was the day he would remember all his life. He always marked it as the day he had become a man.

Lothar was not among those who had thrown his water bottle. Instead, he had shot dead two of the Englishmen as they wriggled forward on their bellies to try and reach the water-bottles. His hatred of the English, learned at the knees of both his mother and his father, had truly be, zun to flower that day and had come into full fruiting in the years that followed.

The English had hunted him and his father like wild animals across the veld. His beloved aunt and three female cousins had died of diphtheria, the white sore throat, in the English concentration camps, but Lothar had made himself believe the story that the English had put fish-hooks in the bread that they fed the Boer women to rip out their throats. It was an English thing, this war on the women and the young girls and the children.

He and his father and his uncles had fought on long otter all hope of victory was gone, the Bitter Enders, they called themselves with pride. When the others, starved to walking skeletons, sick with dysentery and covered with the running ulcerations which they called veld sores, caused by exposure and malnutrition, dressed in their rags and sacking, with only three rounds a piece remaining in their bandoliers, had gone in to surrender to the English at Vereeniging, Petrus De La Rey and his son Lothar had not gone in with them.

Witness my oath, oh Lord of my people, Petrus had stood bareheaded in the veld, with his seventeen-year-old son Lothar beside him. The war against the English will never end. This I swear in your sight, oh Lord God of Israel. Then he had placed the black leather-covered Bible in Lothar's hands and made him swear the same oath.

The war against the English will never end- Lothar had stood beside his father as he cursed the traitors, -he cowards who would no longer fight on, Louis Botha and jannie Smuts, even his own brother Koos De La Rey. You, who would sell your people to the Philistine, may you live all your lives under the English yoke and all burn in hell for ten thousand years. Then the father and the boy had turned their backs and ridden away, towards the vast and land that was the domain of Imperial Germany, and left the others to make peace with England.

Because both father and son were strong, hard workers, both of them endowed with natural shrewdness and courage, because Lothar's mother was a German of good family with excellent connections and some wealth, they had prospered in German South-West Africa.

Petrus De La Rey, Lothar's father, was a self-taught engineer of considerable skill and ingenuity. What he did not know he could improvise: the saying was, "N Boer maak altyd n plan', a Boer will always make a plan.

Through his wife's connections he obtained the contract to reconstruct the breakwater of Liideritzbucht harbour, and when that was successfully completed, the contract to build the railway line northwards from the Orange river to Windhoek, the capital of German South-West.

He taught Lothar his engineering skills. The boy learned swiftly, and by the age of twenty-one was a full partner in the construction and road-building company of De La Rey and Son.

His mother, Christina De La Rey, selected a pretty blonde German girl of good family and moved her diplomatically into her son's orbit, and they were married before Lothar's twenty-third birthday. She bore Lothar a beautiful blond son on whom he doted.

Then the English intruded upon their lives once more, threatening to plunge the entire world into war by opposing the legitimate ambitions of the German empire.

Lothar and his father had gone to Governor Seitz with an offer to build up, at their own expense, supply dumps in the remote areas of the tcrritory to be used by the German forces to resist the English invasion, which"would surely come from the Union of South Africa, now governed by those traitors and turncoats Smuts and Louis Botha.

There had been a German naval captain in Windhoek at the time; he had quickly recognized the value of the De La Rey offer and prevailed on the governor to accept it.

He had sailed with the father and son along that dreadful littoral that so well deserved the name Skeleton Coast, to select a site for a base from which German naval vessels could refuel and revictual, even after the ports of Lilderitzbucht and Walvis Bay were captured by the Union forces.

They discovered a remote and protected bay three hundred miles north of the tenuous settlements at Walvis Bay and Swakopmund, a site almost impossible to reach overland, for it was guarded by the fiery deserts. They loaded a small coastal steamer with the naval stores sent out to them secretly from Bremerhaven in a German cruise ship. There were 500 tons of fuel oil in 44-gallon drums, engine spares and canned foods, small arms and ammunition, nine-inch naval shells, and fourteen of the long Mark VII acoustic torpedoes, to re-arm the German U-boats if they should ever operate in these southern oceans. These supplies were ferried ashore and buried amongst the towering dunes. The lighters were painted with protective tar and buried with the stores.