The Burning Shore - Smith Wilbur. Страница 53

This secret supply base was finally established only weeks before the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated at Sarajevo and the Kaiser was forced to move against the Serbian revolutionaries to protect the interests of the German empire. immediately France and Britain had seized upon this as a pretext for precipitating the war after which they had been lusting.

Lothar and his father saddled their horses and called out their Hottentot servants, kissed their women and Lothar's son farewell, and rode out on commando against the English and their unionist minions once again. They were six hundred strong, riding under the Boer General Maritz, when they reached the Orange river and built their laager and waited for the moment to strike.

Each day armed men rode in to join them, tough, bearded men, proud, hard fighters with the Mousers slung on their shoulders and the bandoliers of ammunition crisscrossing their wide chests. After each joyous greeting, they gave their news, and it was all good.

The old comrades were flocking to the cry of Commando! Everywhere Boers were repudiating the treacherous peace which Smuts and Botha had negotiated with the English. All the old Boer generals were taking to the field. De Wet was camped at Mushroom Valley, Kemp was a Treurfontein with eight hundred, Beyers and Fourie were all out and had declared for Germany against England.

Smuts and Botha seemed reluctant to precipitate a conflict between Boer and Boer, for the Union forces consisted of seventy percent Dutch-born soldiers. They were begging, wheedling and pleading with the rebels, sending envoys to their camps, prostrating themselves in the attempt to avoid bloodshed, but each day the rebel forces grew stronger and more confident.

Then a message reached them, carried by a horseman riding in great haste across the desert from Windhoek. It was a message from the Kaiser himself, relayed to them by Governor Seitz.

Admiral Graf Von Spee with his squadron of battlecruisers had won a devastating naval battle at Coronel on the Chilean coast. The Kaiser had ordered Von Spee to round the Horn and cross the southern Atlantic to blockade and bornbark the South African ports in support of their rebellion against the English and the Unionists.

They stood under the fierce desert sun and cheered and sang, united and sure of their cause, and certain of their victory. They were waiting only for the last of the Boer generals to come in to join them before they marched on Pretoria.

Koos De La Rey, Lothar's uncle, grown old and feeble and indecisive, had still not come in. Lothar's father sent messages to him, urging him to do his duty, but he vacillated, swayed by the treacherous oratory of Jannie Smuts and his misguided love and loyalty for Louis Botha.

Koen Brits was the other Boer leader they were waiting for, that giant of granite, standing six foot six inches tall, who could drink a bottle of fiery Cape Smoke the way a lesser man might quaff a mug of ginger beer, who could lift a trek ox off its feet, spit a stream of tobacco juice a measured twenty paces and with his Mauser hit a running springbok at two hundred paces. They needed him, for a thousand fighting men would follow him when he decided which way to ride.

However, Jannie Smuts sent this remarkable man a message: Call out your commando, Oom Koen, and ride with me. The reply was immediate. Ja my old friend, we are mounted and ready to ride, but who do we fight, Germany or England? So they lost Brits to the Unionists.

Then Koos De La Rey, travelling to a final meeting with Jannie Smuts at which he would make his decision, ran into a police roadblock outside Pretoria and instructed his chauffeur to drive through it. The police marksmen shot him in the head. So they lost De La Rey.

Of course, Jannie Smuts, that cold, crafty devil, had an excuse. He said that the roadblock had been ordered to prevent the escape of the notorious band of bank robbers, the Foster gang, from the area, and that the police had opened fire on a mistaken identity. However, the rebels knew better. Lothar's father had wept openly when they received the news of his brother's murder, and they had known that there was no turning back, no further chance for parley, they would have to carry the land at rifle-point.

The plan was for all the rebel commandos to join up with Maritz on the Orange river, but they had underestimated the new mobility of the forces against them, afforded by the petrol-driven motor car. They had forgotten also that Botha and Smuts had long ago proved themselves the most able of all the Boer generals. When at last they moved, these two moved with the deadly speed of angry mambas.

They caught De Wet at Mushroom Valley and smashed his commando with artillery and machine- guns. There gu were terrible casualties, and De Wet fled into the Kalah ari, pursued by Koen Brits and a motorized column that captured him at Waterburg in the desert.

Then the Unionists swung back and engaged Beyers and his commando near Rustenberg. Once the battle was lost Beyers tried to escape by swimming the flooded Vaal river. His boot-laces became entangled and they found his body three days later on the bank downstream.

On the Orange river, Lothar and his father waited for the inevitable onslaught, but bad news reached them before the Unionists did.

The English Admiral, Sir Doveton Sturdee, had intercepted Von Spee at the Falkland Islands, and sunk his great cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau and the rest of his squadron with only ten British seamen killed. The rebels hope of succour had gone down with the German fleet.

Still they fought doggedly when the Unionists came, but it was in vain. Lothar's father took a bullet through the gut, and Lothar carried him off the field and tried to get him back across the desert to Windhoek where Christina could nurse him. It was five hundred miles of terrible going through the waterless wastes. The old man's pain was so fierce that Lothar wept for him, and the wound was contaminated by the contents of his perforated intestines and mortified so that the stench brought the hyenas howling around the camp at night.

But he was a tough old man and it took him many days to die.

Promise me, my son, he demanded with his last breath that stank of death, promise me that the war with the English will never end. I promise you, Father. Lothar leaned over him to kiss his cheek, and the old man smiled and closed his eyes.

Lothar buried him under a camelthorn tree in the wilderness; he buried him deeply so that the hyena would not smell him and dig him up. Then he rode on home to Windhoek.

Colonel Franke, the German commander, recognized Lothar's value, and asked him to raise a levy of scouts.

Lothar assembled a small band of hardy Boers, German settlers, Bondelswart Hottentots and black tribesmen, and took them out into the desert to await the invasion of Unionist troops.

Smuts and Botha came with 45,000 men and landed at Swakopmund and Ldderitzhucht. From there they drove into the interior, employing their usual tactics, lightning forced marches, often without water for great distances, double-pronged attacks and encircling movements, using the newfangled petrol-driven motor cars the same way they had used horses during the Boer War. Against this multitude Franke had 8,ooo German troops to defend a territory of over 300,000 square miles with a 1,000-mile coastline.

Lothar and his scouts fought the Unionists with their own tactics, poisoning the water-holes ahead of the Union troops, dynamiting the railway lines, hooking around them to attack their supply lines, setting ambushes and landmines, raiding at night and at dawn, driving off the horses, pushing his scouts to even their far borders of endurance.

It was all unavailing. Botha and Smuts caught the tiny German army between them, and with a casuality list of only 5 3o dead and wounded exacted an unconditional surrender from Colonel Franke, but not from Lothar De La Rey. To honour the promise he had made to his father, he took what remained of his band of scouts northwards into the dreaded kakao veld to continue the struggle.