Company Of Spears

The wounded Xhosa had soon lost consciousness, and a fever now burned. Fairbrother had tried at first to question him, and to dull his pain and loosen his tongue with brandy; but he had learned nothing. Neither had they met the patrol from Trompetter’s Drift (it was not surprising: their charge, as Hervey himself had given it, was to scout the east bank of the river), nor even one of the routine patrols from Fort Willshire. Were the patrols diverted north, dealing with an irruption into the old Dutch areas?

The party’s one piece of fortune was that the pan-dours had returned to duty. Fairbrother had found them crouching in the scrub a mile or so from the Gwalana’s head, frightened, confused, only too pleased to see authority again and willing to submit to any punishment. Hervey had berated them in English – which they partially understood (and his manner had left no doubt) – and then Fairbrother had berated them in their own language, calling down every ancestral curse he could recall, shaming them to the point that they looked broken men.

‘Don’t let them fool you,’ he said, when at length Hervey dismissed them with but a day’s stoppage of pay. ‘They’re contrite now, but they’d run again as soon as look at you. We neither pay ‘em enough nor treat them as men, half the time. That and the Hottentot’s natural disinclination to soldiery. You have your martial races in India, do you not? Well, Hervey, these Hottentots ain’t no martial race.’

For the time being, however, the pandours worked willingly cutting thorn bushes, gathering wood, chivvied by Johnson, encouraged by Wainwright. There was perhaps an hour’s daylight left when they halted for the night – another league between them and the Xhosa, another league nearer the post at Trompetter’s Drift. If they had been capable of it. The horses were done, needing water and rest; they had led them for at least half the way. They themselves were footsore and just as weary. Half their kit and provisions they had abandoned (two horses destroyed and the priority to powder and cartridges). But they could not be certain that they were putting any distance between them and the Xhosa. Fairbrother had said he could not imagine why they would follow, but then, he had been first to admit his surprise that a Xhosa should carry a musket. Hervey had been sure they needed time to prepare for the night, to meet the Xhosa on ground of his choosing, properly disposed, ready. It was what he would have done with the Sixth in any rearguard, and he would do the same with a troop of mounted riflemen too. Thus far the prudence of the Peninsula applied as well in Africa.

When he had done all that he could for the security of the party – thorn bushes across the approaches to the bivouac, just out of spear-throwing distance, fires laid at the four points of the compass, with powder trails to each, and every man told off to an alarm post – Hervey spoke quietly to his coverman. ‘Rather a scrape, I’m afraid, Corporal Wainwright.’

‘Ay, sir.’

‘One of us must be awake at all times – you or I.’

‘Ay, sir.’

‘The pandours will stand sentry at the thorn in turn, but one or other of us will have to see they keep post.’

Corporal Wainwright nodded. He understood perfectly well. Johnson was probably as capable, but he did not have the rank, and it would be unfair. And Captain Fairbrother, for all that he had fought with as much nerve as he had ever seen, was not regiment. ‘Sir.’

‘It will be dark in half an hour. Captain Fairbrother says the Xhosa don’t as a rule attack during the night unless they’re sure of their advantage, but I wouldn’t rule out an attack at last light, perhaps to rattle us, and then a full-blown affair at dawn. So we may hear them all night, keeping us from sleep, or else they’ll use the dark to creep into position for the dawn. Either way, not a happy prospect.’

‘We’ll be right, sir.’

Hervey smiled to himself. This was not bravado, just the proper confidence of a non-commissioned officer who had learned his trade in a dozen different scrapes. ‘I would have wished those pandours had a faithful taste for scouting, that’s all. We should have a better notion of whether we’d been followed.’

‘Maybe, sir; but not certain. We’re doing only what we’d be doing anyway.’

Hervey nodded. Wainwright spoke the truth. There could never be a time to take the night’s ease for granted.

‘Do we break camp before first light if we hear nothing in the night, sir?’