SEAN COURTNEY
CONTROL OFFICER
It was clumsy syntax. Mark wondered who had composed it as he crumpled the notice and dropped it into the grass at his feet.
‘What if the pickets won’t let them come out, sir?’ he asked quietly.
‘I don’t pay you to be my conscience, young man,’ Sean growled warningly, and they stood on in silence for a minute. Then Sean sighed and took the cigars from his breast pocket and offered one to Mark as a conciliatory gesture.
‘What can I do, Mark? Must I send my lads into those streets without artillery support?’ He bit the tip off his cigar and spat it into the grass. ‘Whose lives are more important - the strikers and their families or men who trust me and honour me with their loyalty?’ ‘It’s much easier to fight people you hate,’ Mark said softly, and Sean glanced at him sharply.
‘Where did you read that?’ he demanded, and Mark shook his head.
‘At least there are no blacks caught up in this,’ he said. Mark had personally been in charge of sending disguised black policemen through the lines to warn all tribesmen to evacuate the area.
‘Poor blighters,’ Sean agreed. ‘I wonder what they make of this white men’s madness.’ Mark strode to the edge of the shallow cliff, ignoring the danger of sniping fire from the buildings below, and glassed the town carefully. Suddenly he exclaimed with relief, ‘They’re coming out!’
Far below where they stood, the first tiny figures straggled out of the entrance of the Vrededorp subway. The women carried infants and dragged reluctant children at arm’s length. Some were burdened with their personal treasures, others brought their pets, canaries in wire cages, dogs on leashes. The first. small groups and individuals became a trickle and then a sorry, toiling stream, pushing laden bicycles and hand carts, or simply carrying all the possessions they could lift.
‘Send a platoon down to guide them, and give them a hand,’ Sean ordered quietly, and brooded heavily with his beard on his chest. ‘I’m glad to see the women out of it,’ he growled. ‘But I’m sad for what it means.’
‘The men are going to fight,’ Mark said.
‘Yes,’ Sean nodded. ‘They’re going to fight. I had hoped we had had enough slaughter – but they are going to make a bitter ending to a tragic tale.’ He crushed the stub of his cigar under his heel. ‘All right, Mark. Go down and tell Molyneux that it’s on. Eleven hundred hours we’ll open the barrage. Good luck, son.’
Mark saluted, and Sean Courtney left him and limped back from the crest to join General Smuts and his staff who had come out to watch the final sweep of the battle.
The first shrapnel bursts clanged across the sky, and burst in bright gleaming cotton pods of smoke above the roofs of Fordsburg, cracking the sky and the waiting silence, with startling violence.
They were fired by the horse artillery batteries on the ridge, and immediately the other batteries on Sauer Street joined in.
For twenty minutes, the din was appalling and the brilliant air was sullied by the rising mist of smoke and dust. Mark stood in the hastily dug trench and peered over the parapet. There was something so dreadfully familiar in this moment. He had lived it fifty times before, but now he felt his nerves screwing down too tightly and the heavy indigestible lump of fear in his guts nauseated him.
He wanted to duck down below the parapet, cover his head to protect his ears from the great metallic hammer-blows of sound, and stay there.
It required an immense effort of will to stand where he was and to keep his expression calm and disinterested – but the men of ‘A’ Company lined the trench on each side of him and, to distract himself, he began to plan his route through the outskirts of the town.
There would be road-blocks at every corner, and every cottage would be held. The artillery barrage would not have affected the strikers under cover, for it was limited to shrapnel bursts. Sean Courtney was concerned with the safety of over a hundred police and military personnel who had been captured by the strikers and were being held somewhere in the town.
‘No high explosive,’ was the order, and Mark knew his company would be cut to ribbons on the open streets.
He was going to take them through the kitchen yards and down the sanitary lanes to their final objective, the Trades Hall on Commercial and Central Streets.
He checked his watch again, and there were four minutes to go.
‘All right, Sergeant,’ he said quietly.
The order passed quickly down the trench and the men came to their feet, crouching below the parapet.
‘Like old times, sir,’ the Sergeant said affably, and Mark glanced at him. He seemed actually to be enjoying this moment – and Mark found himself hating the man for it.
‘Let’s go,’ he said abruptly, as the minute hand of his watch touched the black hair-line division, and the Sergeant blew his whistle shrilly.
Mark put one hand on the parapet and leapt nimbly over the top.
He started to run forward, and from the cottages ahead of him came the harsh crackling of musketry. Suddenly, he realized he was no longer afraid.
He was little more than a youth, with smooth pink cheeks and the lightest golden fluff of a moustache on his upper lip.
They shoved him down the last few steps into the cellars, and he lost his footing and fell.
‘Another yellow belly,’ called the escort, a strapping bearded fellow with a rifle slung on his shoulder and the red band around his upper arm. ‘Caught him trying to sneak out of the subway.’
The boy scrambled to his feet. He had skinned his knees in his fall and he was close to tears as Harry Fisher towered above him. He carried a long black sjambok in his right hand, a vicious tapered whip of cured hippo-hide.
‘A traitor,’ bellowed Fisher. In the last days of continuous planning and fighting, the strain had started to show. His eyes had taken on a wild fanatical glare, his movements were jerky and exaggerated, and his voice ragged and overloud.
‘No, comrade, I swear I’m no traitor,’ the youth bleated pitifully.
‘A coward, then,’ shouted Fisher, and caught the front of the boy’s shirt in one big hairy fist and ripped it open to the waist.
‘I didn’t have a rifle,’ protested the boy.
‘There’ll be rifles for all later — when the first comrades die.’
The lash of the sjambok split the smooth white skin of the boy’s back like a razor stroke, and the blood rose in a vivid bright line as he fell to his knees.
Harry Fisher stood over him and swung the sjambok until there were no more screams or groans, and the only sound in the cellar was the hiss and splat of the lash — then he stood back panting and sweating.
‘Take him out so the comrades can see what happens to traitors and cowards.’
A striker took each of the boy’s arms and as they dragged him up the steps, the flesh of his back hung in ribbons and tatters and the blood ran down over his belt and soaked into the gaberdine of his breeches.
Mark dropped cat-footed over the back wall into the tiny paved yard. Cases of empty beer bottles were piled high along the side walls, and the smell of stale liquor was fruity and heady in the noon heat.
He had reached the bottle store in Mint Road less than an hour after the starting time of the drive, and the route he had led his men, through the backyards and over the roof-tops, had been more successful than he had dared hope.
They had avoided the road-blocks and twice had outflanked groups of strikers dug into strong positions, surprising them completely, and scattering them with a single volley.
Mark ran across the yard and kicked in the back door of the bottle store, and in the same movement flattened himself against the wall, clear of the gaping doorway and any striker fire from the interior of the building.
The Sergeant and a dozen men followed him over the wall, and spread out to cover the doorway and barred windows. He nodded at Mark, and Mark dived through the doorway sideways with the rifle on his hip, and his eyes screwed up against
the gloom after the bright sunlight outside.
The store was deserted, the shutters bolted down over the front windows and the shelves of bottles untouched by looters, in testimony of the strikers’ discipline. The tiers of bottles stood neatly in their gaily coloured labels, glinting in the dusky light.
The last time Mark had been in here was to buy a dozen bottles of porter for Helena MacDonald, but he pushed the thought aside and went to the shuttered windows just as the Sergeant and his squad burst in through the back door.
The shutters had been pierced by random shrapnel and rifle fire, and Mark used one aperture as a peephole.
Fifty yards across the road was the Trades Hall, and the complex of trenches and defences that the strikers had thrown up around the square.
Even the public lavatories had been turned into a blockhouse, but all the defenders’ attention was directed into the streets across the square.
They lined the parapets and were firing frantically at the kilted running figures of the Transvaal Scottish racing towards the Square from the station side.
The strikers were dressed in a strange assortment of garb, from greasy working overalls and quasi-military safari jackets, caps and slouch hats and beavers, to Sunday suits, waistcoats and ties. But all of them wore bandoliers of ammunition draped from their shoulders, and their backs were exposed to Mark’s attack.
A volley through the bottle-store windows would have done terrible execution among them, and already the Sergeant was directing his men to each of the windows in a fierce and gleeful croak of anticipation.
‘I could order up a machine gun,’ Mark thought, and something in him shied away from the mental image of a Vickers firing into that exposed and unsuspecting group. ‘If only I hated them.’
As he watched, first one and then others of the strikers at the barricades crouched down hopelessly from the withering fire the Highlanders were now pouring on to them.
‘Fix bayonets,’ Mark called to the men, and the steel scraped from the metal scabbards in the sombre gloom of the store. A stray bullet splintered the shutter above Mark’s head and burst a bottle of Scotch whisky on the shelves behind him. The smell of the spirit was sharp and unpleasant, and Mark called again, ‘On my order, break open the windows and doors, and we’ll show them steel.’
The shutters crashed back, the main doors flew open, and Mark led his company in a howling racing line across the road. Before they reached the first line of sand-bags, the strikers began throwing down their rifles and jumping up with their hands lifted above their heads.
Across the square, the Highlanders poured into the street cheering and shouting and raced for the barricades; Mark felt a surge of relief that he had taken the risk of going with the bayonet, rather than ordering his men to shoot down the exposed strikers.
As his men ran into the square, knocking the weapons out of their hands and pushing the strikers into sullen groups, Mark was racing up the front steps of the Trades Hall.
He paused on the top step, shouted, ‘Stand back inside’ and fired three rifle bullets into the brass lock.
Harry Fisher leaned against the wall and peered out of the sand-bagged window into the milling yelling chaos of the square.
The madness of unbearable despair shook the huge frame, and he breathed like a wounded bull when it stands to take the matador’s final thrust. He watched his men throw down their arms, saw them herded like cattle, with their hands held high, stumbling on weary careless feet, their faces grey with fatigue and sullen in defeat.
He groaned, a low hollow sound of emotional agony stretched to its furthest limits, and the thick shoulders sagged. He seemed to be shrinking in size. The great unkempt head lowered, the blazing vision dimmed in his eyes as he watched the young lieutenant in barathea battledress race up the stairs below him, and heard the rifle shots shatter the lock.
He shambled across to his desk and slumped down into the chair facing the closed door, and his hand was shaking as he drew the service revolver from his belt and cocked the hammer. He laid the weapon carefully on the desk in front of him.
He cocked his head and listened to the shouted orders and the trampling confusion in the square below for a minute, then he heard the rush of booted feet up the wooden staircase beyond the door.
He lifted the revolver from the desk, and leaned both elbows on the desk-top to steady himself.
Mark burst in through the main doors of the hall and stopped in surprise and confusion. The floor was covered with prostrate bodies, it seemed there must be hundreds of them.
As he stared, a Captain of Highlanders and half a dozen men burst in behind him. They stopped also.
‘Good God,’ panted the Captain, and then suddenly Mark realized that the bodies were all uniformed, police khaki, hunting green kilts, barathea.
‘They have slaughtered their prisoners,’ Mark thought with nightmare horror, staring at the mass of bodies, then suddenly a head lifted cautiously and another.
‘Oh thank God,’ breathed the Captain beside Mark, as the prisoners began scrambling to their feet, their faces shining with relief, a single voice immediately becoming a hubbub of nervous gaiety.
They surged for the door, some to embrace their liberators and others merely to run out into the sunlight.
Mark avoided a big police Sergeant with rumpled uniform and three days’ growth of beard, ducked under his arms and ran for the staircase.
He took the stairs three at a time, and paused on the landing. The doors to five offices on this floor were standing open, the sixth was closed. He moved swiftly down the corridor, checking each of the rooms.
Cupboards and desks had been ransacked, and the floors were ankle-deep in paper, chairs overturned, drawers pulled from desks and dumped into the litter of paper.
The sixth door at the end of the passage was the only one closed. It was the office of the local Union chairman, Mark knew, Fergus MacDonald’s office. The man for whom he was searching, driven by some lingering loyalty, by the dictates of shared comradeship and friendship to find him now – and to give him what help and protection he could.
Mark slipped the safety-catch on the rifle as he approached the door. He reached for the handle, and once again that sense of danger warned him. For a moment he stood with his fingers almost touching the brass lock, then he stepped quietly out of the line of the doorway; reaching sideways he rattled the handle softly and then turned it.
The door was unlocked, and the latch snicked and he pushed the door open. Nothing happened, and Mark grunted with relief and stepped through the doorway.
Harry Fisher sat at the desk facing him, a huge menacing figure, crouching over the desk with the big tousled head lowered on massive shapeless shoulders and the revolver held in both hands, pointing directly at Mark’s chest.
Mark knew that to move was death. He could see the rounded leaden noses of the bullets in the loaded chambers of the cylinder and the hammer fully cocked, and he stood frozen.
‘It is not defeat,’ Harry Fisher spoke with a strangled hoarse voice that Mark did not recognize. ‘We are the dragon’s teeth. Wherever you bury one of us, a thousand warriors will spring up.’
‘It’s over, Harry,’ Mark spoke carefully, trying to distract him, for he knew he could not lift the rifle and fire in the time Harry Fisher could pull the trigger.
‘No.’ Fisher shook the coarse tangled locks of his head. ‘It is only just beginning.’
Mark did not realize what he was doing, until Harry Fisher had reversed the pistol and thrust the muzzle into his own mouth. The explosion was muffled, and Harry Fisher’s head was stretched out of shape, as though it were a rubber ball struck by a bat.
The back of his skull erupted, and a loose mass of bright scarlet and custard yellow splattered the wall behind him.
The impact of the bullet hurled his body backwards and his chair toppled and crashed over.
The stench of burned powder hung in the room on filmy wisps of gunsmoke, and Harry Fisher’s boo
ted heels kicked and tapped a jerky, uneven little dance on the bare wooden floor.
‘Where is Fergus MacDonald?’ Mark asked the question a hundred times of the files of captured strikers. They stared back at him, angry, bitter, some of them still truculent and defiant, but not one of them even deigned to answer.
Mark took three of his men, under the pretext of a mopping-up patrol, down to Lover’s Walk as far as the cottage.
The front door was unlocked, and the beds in the front room were unmade. Mark felt a strange repugnance of mind, balanced by a plucking of lust at his loins, when he saw Helena’s crêpe de Chine dressing-gown thrown across the chair, and a crumpled pair of cotton panties dropped carelessly on the floor beside it.
He turned away quickly, and went through the rest of the house. The dirty dishes in the kitchen had already grown a green fuzz of mould, and the air was stale and disused. Nobody had been in these rooms for days.
A scrap of paper lay on the floor beside the coal-black stove. Mark picked it up and saw the familiar hammer and sickle device on the pamphlet. He screwed it up and hurled it against the wall. His men were waiting for him on the stoep.
The strikers had dynamited the railway lines at Braamfontein station, and at the Church Street level-crossing, so the regiment could not entrain at Fordsburg. Most of the roads were blocked with rubble and the detritus of the final struggle, but most dangerous was the possibility of stubborn strikers still hiding out in the buildings that lined the road through the dip to Johannesburg.
Sean Courtney decided to move his men out up the slope to the open ground of the Crown Deep property.
They marched out of Fordsburg in the darkness, before good shooting light. It had been a long uncomfortable night, and nobody had slept much. Weariness made their packs leaden to carry and shackled their legs. There was less than a mile to go, however.