The Dark Tower

Chapter 4
Septimus, September 1879: Cape Town
He’d had no intention of falling in love with Laura Brooke. It had happened, that’s all. Being thrown together with her at Cora De Villiers’s; and then finding her so very much out of reach. If she’d been a widow, it might have been easier; or even a woman unhappily married—he’d met a few of those. But to have fallen for someone who barely knew he was there, because her thoughts were fixed on the man she loved—a man, moreover, who happened to be dead—was the kind of darned bad luck he’d never run into till then.
She had intrigued him from the start. She was reserved—but then most Englishwomen were. This was more than just maidenly bashfulness. He’d never had the slightest trouble overcoming that. A remark about the brightness of someone’s eyes, or the whiteness of someone’s hand, usually sufficed in such cases, he’d found.
Septimus was not unduly prone to vanity, but he knew that he generally passed muster with the female sex. Women liked him; they noticed him.
Only this woman failed to notice him.

He’d called the morning after Cora De Villiers’s party, hoping to see her once more, but had found only the mistress of the house, looking sallow and greasy-faced after a late night and too much champagne.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said, as he walked into the room. ‘I thought it was that old bore Schermbrucker. He’s got it into his head that he’s in love with me…’
‘The way you looked last night in that pretty red dress, I can’t say I blame him at all.’
Cora raised an eyebrow at this. ‘Flatterer. I know it’s not my charms which draw you here.’
He was startled. What had she guessed? Then he saw that she was laughing.
‘Confess it,’ she said. ‘You’ve fallen in love with Laura Brooke. Don’t think I didn’t see you, whispering away in the corner together…’
It was easy to parry absurdity with further absurdity.
‘I can tell you straight out—she isn’t my type. I like a woman with a bit more ‘go’…’
Miss Leibbrandt, who was mending a stocking in an obscure part of the room, gave a small cough.
‘You Americans and your barbarous expressions,’ said Mrs De Villiers lightly. But he could tell he had pleased her, by the amorous look she threw him. ‘You’ll be joining us for luncheon, I suppose?’
He’d opened his mouth to refuse when the sound of voices drifting through the open veranda doors alerted him to the return of the two English ladies. ‘Why, that’d be swell,’ he said, and was rewarded with another soft look from his mistress.
When Laura Brooke walked in, he was struck again by the graceful way she held herself; she had none of Cora De Villiers’s imperious style, and yet she drew the eye. He thought she seemed glad to see him, although she threw him only a brief smile. But maybe that was on account of Cora being there, with a face like a cat watching a mouse. There wasn’t much love lost between those two—that much was plain to see.
‘Ah, there you are, Miss Brooke!’ said Cora. ‘So thoughtful of you to join us at last! And dear Emiline, too,’ she added, as that lady came in. ‘You are looking very pale, my dear. I hope you are not tired out from all your rambling about the garden…’
‘Not in the least,’ said Mrs Reynolds. ‘The air has done me good.’
‘Miss Brooke does so insist on her walks—do you not, Miss Brooke?’ went on Mrs De Villiers. ‘I have never met such a one for walking. Only the other day I had to send the boy to find her, because she had got lost in the woods at Newlands…’
Laura smiled. ‘I was not lost. I had forgotten the time.’
‘I have warned her and warned her of the dangers of snakes and scorpions,’ said Cora De Villiers. ‘But do you think she will listen?’
‘I always have a good stick with me,’ said Laura. ‘And my boots are quite stout.’
‘Indeed,’ said her hostess, barely suppressing a shudder.
‘If you like walking, you must certainly climb the Lion’s Head,’ said Septimus, aware as he spoke that his intervention could only add fuel to the fires of his mistress’s jealousy. ‘There’s a remarkably fine view to be had from the top of it. I could take you, if you like…’
It was worth any amount of sulking on Cora’s part to see the look that Laura Brooke gave him. As if he had offered her the dearest wish of her heart.
‘Would you?’ At once her expression clouded. ‘But it would be an imposition…’
‘Not a bit,’ he replied, amused by the furious looks that Cora was directing at him. ‘We could go tomorrow, if you like. The climb itself takes little more than two hours. Early morning is the best time—to avoid the worst of the heat, you know.’
‘I should like that very much,’ said Laura. ‘That is—if you can spare me,’ she added to Mrs Reynolds.
‘Oh, my dear, of course you must go,’ said that lady. ‘Since Mr Doyle is so kind as to offer to accompany you…’
‘Why don’t we all go?’ interjected Mrs De Villiers, with a triumphant glance at her lover. ‘Emiline will enjoy the drive—will you not, dear? There is a pleasant enough view from Signal Hill. And Gertrude likes a walk—do you not, Gertrude? She can go with you on your climb, whilst Emiline and I have a nice long gossip. We can take a picnic!’ she cried, her good humour quite restored, it seemed, by her annexation of the plan. ‘Cold chicken—I am sure there is some cold chicken left over from last night—and potted shrimps, and all kinds of good things. Such a charming idea. I am glad I thought of it.’
In the event, it was late afternoon before they were ready to go, since—as Septimus knew from intimate experience—Mrs De Villiers was seldom visible before noon, her mornings being consumed by complicated rituals of bathing and dressing. By that time, the heat was intense and there was no option but to wait it out—sunstroke being so very disagreeable, Mrs De Villiers said, with her tinkling laugh.
It was still hot when they set out, although the sun was low in the sky, striking off the white walls of buildings in the city’s bowl, as the carriage ascended the lower slopes of Signal Hill. For those, like himself, who were familiar with the climate, it was possible to differentiate between this relative coolness—comparable to that of an English summer or a New York fall—and the fiery temperatures often reached in December.
Not that he was overly troubled by the heat, but he felt some concern for the fair skins of the English ladies. Both wore hats, it was true, but Miss Brooke had soon discarded hers, preferring, she said, to feel the sun on her face; even Mrs Reynolds had thrown back her veil.
‘For it is such a treat,’ she said. ‘not to be cold all the time—is it not, Laura dear?’
Cora De Villiers took no such chances. To the protective screen of hat and veil she had added a silk parasol. ‘Otherwise one burns as black as the natives,’ she said. She seemed in high spirits—shouting at the driver to go slowly over the ruts, so as not to shake up the champagne too much. ‘We will all be as merry as crickets by the time we have finished our walk.’ Quite forgetting she was not of the walking party.
When the driver had been thoroughly scolded, she turned her attention to Septimus. His clothes were quite frightful, she said.
‘I am quite ashamed to be seen with you,’ she cried. ‘You look as if you are dressed for a day’s shooting, instead of for an afternoon’s picnicking with ladies.’
Of Miss Brooke’s appearance she said nothing, only nudging Septimus’s foot with her own, to direct his attention to the younger woman’s footwear—a pair of unremarkable brown boots.
‘Like a housemaid’s,’ was Cora’s whispered verdict.
Privately, he thought Miss Brooke’s boots perfectly fine, and quite the thing for walking. They were certainly more suitable than the dainty kid slippers Cora was wearing. As if by accident, she let her foot rest against his for the remainder of the journey. A month ago, that slight but insistent pressure would have thrilled him, with its promise of carnal pleasures to come; now, her touch seemed merely annoying.
The fact of it was, he was more excited by the glimpse he got of Laura Brooke’s slender ankles, briefly visible above the clumsy boots as she jumped down from the carriage, than by all Cora’s studied charms.
‘Don’t be too long,’ that lady called from her seat in the landeau. ‘Or the champagne will be getting warm…’
Whether it was this last injunction, or simply a desire to be free of the constraints of the past few days which determined the smart pace at which his young companion set out, Septimus could not be sure; any doubts he might have had as to whether Miss Brooke would be ‘up to’ the climb, vanished in an instant. The path was steep, with tumbled rocks here and there forming a kind of staircase; these she ascended in a twinkling, with no more effort than if she were running upstairs at home to fetch something she had forgotten.
At the top of this first ‘flight’ she stood waiting for him to catch up with her. Both waited as Gertrude Leibbrandt toiled up behind them. From here, the view was of wooded slopes, thick with flowering shrubs. Protea of some sort; he did not know the names. Birches and silver trees. In the distance, rose the mountains: the Twelve Apostles to one side; the Devil’s Peak to the other, with the great span of Table Mountain between it and where they were standing.
At this distance, the city seemed no bigger than a toy, built out of a child’s wooden blocks. Beyond, was the curve of the bay, a deep azure at this hour.
‘How wonderful,’ she said.
She was as he had never yet seen her: her eyes bright with pleasure, a warm colour in her cheeks from her exertions. A transformed creature, he thought, allowing himself to speculate as to which was her truer nature: the shy girl of the night before, or this Maenad, with flushed face and tumbled locks. He knew which of the two he preferred.
‘Shall we go on?’ he said.
‘O, surely we have only just started?’ she replied, as—Miss Leibbrandt having got her breath back—they set off once more.
‘I believe you’re going to Natal?’ he said. He did not say from whom he had heard it, since this was obvious enough.
‘Yes.’
‘You didn’t mention it last night.’
‘There was not an opportunity to do so.’
‘I’m sorry. I do tend to run on…’
‘I meant that we were interrupted. By our friend,’ she added sotto voce, since Miss Leibbrandt was within earshot. She smiled. ‘You see now why I was so intent on quizzing you about it.’
‘I guess so. It’s a dangerous place for a woman, you know…’
‘So people keep telling me. I’m not afraid, however.’
‘I’m sure you’re not. You don’t strike me as the type that’s easily scared.’
She laughed. ‘You seem very sure of my character, for someone who has known me a mere matter of days.’
In another woman, he would have called her tone flirtatious. But when he glanced at her sideways, her expression gave nothing away.
‘I find I can generally form a pretty good opinion of a person’s character from a few moments’ acquaintance,’ he said. ‘It goes with my profession…’
‘Of course. What an interesting profession that must be.’
Again, he had the feeling that she was laughing at him.
‘I find it so, most of the time. But we were talking of your trip to Natal…’
‘Were we? I didn’t think that there was much more to say. Beyond the fact that it is generally considered to be a dangerous place, and quite unsuitable for ladies.’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘Not in so many words.’
They had reached the point where the sandy track up which they had been climbing with increasingly difficulty gave way to a steep rock-face. A chain was attached to the rock, by means of iron rivets, hammered in at intervals. It was with the aid of this that they were intending to reach the summit. Now, as they waited for Miss Leibbrandt to join them, he felt an impulse to confess all that he knew. It was with a flicker of shame that he recalled how it was that he had come to know it.
He’d been in bed with Cora De Villiers at the time. Earlier that evening, she’d thrown a tantrum, about the attentions he’d—allegedly—been paying to Miss Brooke. It had taken a good deal of placatory—and amorous—activity on his part to disabuse her of the notion. Afterwards, she was like a cat that had got the cream—stretching her long white arms above her head in an exaggerated yawn of satisfied desire.
‘Anyway,’ she had said, continuing the conversation interrupted by these transports, ‘even if you were thinking of amusing yourself with our Miss Brooke, she’s not for the taking.’
‘Why? Is she engaged to be married?’
Cora De Villiers laughed. Her handsome head, with its coils of dark hair, turned towards him on the pillow. ‘In a manner of speaking. The man she was going to marry was killed a year ago, out in Natal. At Isandula, or some such…’
‘Isandhlwana.’
He was silent a moment, recalling his visit to the place, five months before. Even now, he could not suppress a shiver of disgust at the memory. The piles of desiccated corpses. The pervasive stench… He had never seen anything more disgusting, nor more pitiful.
There had been a great black crow at work upon something—a human skull, he saw, when he drew nearer. He’d shouted to scare it off, but it had merely flapped its wings and settled a short distance away, awaiting its chance to return.
‘Did I not tell you?’ Cora was saying. ‘It was Emiline Reynolds’s son she was engaged to. The two of them—she and Emiline, that is, not the son, you know—are making a pilgrimage to the place where he was killed. It is all quite romantic. Although what they hope to find there, I can’t imagine…’
Now he turned to Laura Brooke.
‘I’m very sorry for your loss,’ he said.
She did not reply at once.
‘I’m also sorry if I offended you. My remarks the other night were ill-judged…’
‘I was not offended.’
It was at this moment that Miss Leibbrandt joined them, red in the face and out of sorts. ‘I am finished,’ she said. ‘I cannot go another step. The view is very nice indeed, but at my age, one can have enough of views.’
From here the view was of the broad sweep of the Atlantic coast, dotted here and there along the edge of it by the elegant villas of Sea Point. A bench had been placed at the spot. Onto this Miss Leibbrandt subsided, with a grateful sigh.
‘I will sit here, and wait for you,’ she said. ‘I have done my best. I am sure Cora would not expect me to do more.’
Laura’s hands were already grasping the heavy chain. As Septimus watched, she swung herself up to the first rocky ledge, as light as a fairy, he thought, setting off after her.
But even with the chain for a handhold it was harder going than before. More than once he heard her exclaim under her breath at a slip or stumble.
Of course it was harder for her; she was, after all, of the weaker sex; although he for one had never cared for the term. He had known several young ladies in his time who could ride a horse or draw a bow as well as any man, and he had once heard Mrs Stanton speak at a rally in New York City. A handsome woman, and most persuasive on the suffrage question, he’d thought. If there were any justice in the world, she’d have a seat in Congress by now.
‘Oh…’ This time she had almost fallen. ‘These wretched skirts,’ she said. ‘They do so get in the way.’
‘Here. Take my hand.’
She hesitated no more than a moment. It was simple expediency, was it not? And they were now out of sight of censorious eyes.
‘Thank you.’
Her hand felt warm, and a little gritty, after her recent tumble. But had it been as cool and smooth as marble, it could have produced no more powerful a sensation in him. He was not unacquainted with the sensation, of course; still, it was disconcerting when it happened in the presence of a lady.
When they reached the top, she disengaged herself briskly.
‘I’m sure I shall manage from now on.’
A rough path climbed up the side of the crag, between tumbled rocks. Out of a cleft, a tree grew—at what seemed an impossible angle. She wondered at it.
‘How does it sustain itself? There is barely enough soil for a blade of grass.’
‘Things seem to grow here in the most inhospitable conditions,’ he said. ‘In Namaqualand, it rains but once a year. When it does, the desert is filled with flowers.’
‘How I should like to see that!’
It was on the tip of his tongue to say that he would take her; if she had been an American girl he would not have hesitated. But his years in England had taught him that one did not express oneself with such freedom to English girls.
So he merely said, ‘Come. You’ll like the view from up here. We’ll have all of Cape Town at our feet.’
When they got to the summit, the sun was low in the sky, and the whole scene was bathed in a golden light: mountains, rocks and far below, the intricate grid of streets which was the city. The sea was a deep blue. The sheer rock face of Table Mountain, cleft with deep shadows in the evening light, seemed, to his fancy, to be half alive—a breathing presence. How insignificant he felt in the face of it…
He was about to make some such observation—to remark on how one’s sense of self was diminished in such a landscape—when he saw she was no longer beside him.
‘Say—take care, won’t you?’
For she had stepped without hesitation over the narrow space which lay between the cliff’s edge and a shelf of rock which jutted out from it, so that she stood suspended directly over the frightful drop—it must have been a thousand feet. More.
From where he stood, dry-mouthed at the sight, it appeared as if there were nothing between her and the sea below. If she fell she would be dashed to pieces.
‘Step back,’ he called. Thinking, if I try and grab hold of her, she might lose her balance…
But she did not hear him—or pretended not to—the wind whipping her skirts around her, so that it seemed for an instant as if she might be tugged over the precipice whether she wished it or no.
Then she turned to face him, a smile of such delight on her face that he felt his heart turn over. She spread her arms wide, to encompass everything beyond: sea, sky, and shining city.
‘Is it not the most beautiful sight you ever saw?’ she cried.
Only then did he venture closer. ‘I’d like it a lot better if you were to admire it from a safer distance.’
‘You are afraid I will fall and kill myself,’ she said. ‘But don’t worry. I am quite sure-footed.’
A moment later, she leapt nimbly across the gap and stood beside him. He breathed again.
‘I am sorry if I frightened you,’ she said, with a mischievous look.
It was true that he’d been frightened. But he wasn’t going to admit it.
‘You are not dressed for climbing,’ was all he said. ‘You said so yourself.’
‘When are we women ever dressed for anything—except sitting with our hands folded in our laps?’ she replied.
He was not sure how to answer her.
‘Please do not think me ungrateful,’ she went on. ‘I could not have seen this’—again, her arms were spread wide to embrace the broad sweep of the landscape—‘without you to bring me.’
He started to say that he was glad to have been of service, but she cut across him.
‘I have wanted to see this view more than I can say. To see it for myself, that is—for I feel that I have seen it before, in another’s account of it.’
She broke off; then drew a breath and continued: ‘Lieutenant Reynolds came here, you know, and stood where we are standing. It was he who told me about the rocks which hang out over the bay.’
She said nothing more, but stood as if lost in thought, looking back at the spot where she had stood so precariously balanced between heaven and earth.
Septimus could not repress a pang of envy towards the other man, if only for the fact that it was of him that she was certainly thinking—although it was ridiculous, surely, to be envious of the dead?

He’d been working as a stringer for the New York Times—writing occasional pieces on up-and-coming politicians, and reports on which of the aforementioned was in attendance on such and such an evening at the salon of this or that fashionable Manhattan hostess—when the call had come. The Queen had been proclaimed Empress of India (a clever piece of work on the part of Disraeli) and they needed someone in London, to cover the ensuing celebrations.
Webster was to have gone; but Webster’s wife was sick—and so he, Doyle, would take Webster’s place, said his editor, the formidable Ormerod.
He had expected to find London a backward city, full of mouldering mansions and gimcrack palaces, and stuffed with duchesses and bishops; it turned out to be as modern as he could have wished. Duchesses were certainly to be found, but not in unreasonable numbers; as for the palaces, there were much grander buildings on the Upper East Side, in his opinion.
What impressed him more than the crumbling glories of Westminster and St James’s was the City, with its towering marble banks and offices. Here, at the heart of the Old World, was a modern metropolis. The Fleet Street office where he spent his days was as up-to-date as anything in Manhattan, with its constant chatter of telegraph and rattle of type-writing machines, and its uniformed messenger-boys running in and out.
At the end of three months, when he found himself recalled to New York, he had made up his mind to stay on. A job had presented itself, fortuitously, at the Illustrated London News. The remuneration, if not exactly princely, was adequate and the brief—to cover the recent disturbances in Kabul—one he could not resist.
It amazed him, looking back, to think that he had ever thought London parochial. It was the hub of everything that was going on, not only in the (quaintly-named) British Isles, but all over: India, China, Africa. Could his native land claim as much? He thought not. America—although undoubtedly progressive—was also sadly inward-looking. Even its wars were internal affairs. What sort of country was it, after all, that would have allowed its citizens to turn upon each other, as his countrymen had done in ‘61?
The British ordered these things better: for them, war was a branch of foreign policy.
He had been fortunate enough to observe this at close quarters, during his time in Afghanistan. He had remained there for six weeks, stationed with the Yorkshire regiment, who were on a tour of duty in the border region. His account of the conflict, A Plain Man’s View of the Afghan War—accompanied by sketches that were later ‘got up’ by one of the paper’s resident artists—proved a great success.
It was on the strength of this that he was given Africa.

The news had come in on the wire on the morning of the 12th February. Septimus had been cooling his heels in McClintock’s outer office, in the hope that something of interest might be put his way. The glory of his Kabul article had begun to fade a little, and pickings, of late, had been small. A Prime Ministerial speech on the Suez canal. A state visit by the Tsar and Tsarina.
What he longed for, shifting uncomfortably from one buttock to the other on one of McClintock’s hard chairs, was for a return to Afghanistan. The situation had cooled in recent weeks, it was true; but there was always a chance that it might grow hotter again.
So it was with some alacrity that he got to his feet, as the door of the inner office burst open, and the editor’s red-bearded face appeared.
‘Something’s happened,’ McClintock said. ‘Not good. Not good at all, from the sound of it. There’s been a battle. Great loss of life. Ours, it would seem…’
Then, as Septimus—his heart already leaping at the prospect of what must surely follow: India; the North West Frontier—got to his feet, McClintock went on,
‘We’ll need a man out there of course. You’ll do. But it might take time. The government’ll be sending reinforcements, I imagine. Or they might not. One thing’s certain—there’s going to be an almighty row about this. I mean,’ said McClintock, permitting himself a wintry smile, ‘to lose a whole regiment looks like carelessness, doesn’t it? Dizzy’s going to be hopping mad. Given that he’d practically washed his hands of Africa…’
‘Africa?’ Septimus had been unable to keep the dismay from his voice. He had not been thinking of Africa.
‘Why, yes. Didn’t I say? They’ve gone and started a war. In Zululand, I believe. Very embarrassing all round—to be soundly beaten by a lot of savages. But that’s the English for you,’ said McClintock, who was Scottish. ‘Always underestimating the enemy.’
In the event, it was the end of March before Septimus reached Natal—in time for the first despatches from Khambula: a victory, at last. ‘The tide is turning in our favour,’ he wrote in his report. ‘In the space of a mere six weeks, the Zulu army has been utterly routed, and the rule of law imposed on these uncivilised lands.’
Privately, he wondered whether this was true. There was still a war to win, against an enemy which could not always be found, and which all too frequently refused to obey the rules of civilised warfare. Not that the Zulus were the only ones capable of barbarism, that was a fact—although like a lot of other facts, it could not be published.
After Rorke’s Drift, any Zulus found hiding in the fields around the camp, had been rounded up and strung up on a makeshift gallows. Others, too badly injured to be worth the bother of hanging, had been clubbed to death with rifle butts, or flung into the burial pit still alive. At Khambula, too, native prisoners had been slaughtered—again, nobody could say how many. Fifty, a hundred—or perhaps five hundred?
These things could not be spoken of; far less written about in the pages of eminent journals, such as his own. To have done so, would have been to incur the wrath, not only of the officer corps, but of the British public as a whole. The heroes of Isandhlwana and Rorke’s Drift could not be associated with any kind of improper conduct—least of all cold-blooded murder.
What the public wanted was tales of heroism and sacrifice, not beastliness. ‘The Saving of the Colours’ or the ‘Defence of the Mission Station’—those were tales of which people could not get enough, it seemed. He himself had contributed his share…
‘It was a very pitiful sight,’ he wrote in his first despatch from the battlefield, ‘to be walking there, under the blue heavens, and to stumble, amongst the long grass, on the bleached bones of some poor fellow who had breathed his last upon that alien soil.’

Here lay the remains of one such—speared through the heart with such force that the corpse was pinioned to the ground. There, another lay sprawled as if in sleep, the remnants of his scarlet coat fluttering in the light wind that stirred the grass, like the petals of a poppy in a cornfield…

That was coming it a bit, he knew; but the public liked a touch of poesy with its morning eggs and bacon.

See, further up the hill (that terrible hill!), where the flight of those last survivors can be traced in the line of bodies, strung out like beads upon a string—or, dare one say, like bullets upon a bandolier—all the way along the ridge. Here they fought; here they fell; here they died, these noble men. For theirs, make no mistake, is the stuff of nobility. Englishmen everywhere…

Septimus’s pen held fire for a moment, then wrote on, an English pen for the duration.

Englishmen around the globe, wherever they might be in the service of this greatest of nations, will raise a cheer, or bow a head, or wipe away a silent tear, to think of the deeds that were accomplished on that day: January 22nd, Anno Domini 1879. Let it be written in letters of fire…

Again, he hesitated a moment; remembered the eaters of bacon and eggs, and continued.

…in letters of fire, I say—a date to be spoken of with awe and remembered for as long as men have brains to think or hearts to feel…

It was strong stuff—but the readers of the Illustrated London News, the Daily News, the Telegraph (for Septimus was syndicated now) could not get enough of it, evidently. And his was the pen, English or not, to give it to them—whether it was tales of courage under fire, of Captain Younghusband, on his rocky eminence, holding the savage foe at bay; or of self-sacrifice. Lieutenant Smith-Dorrien risking death to help a wounded man; Lieutenant Pope firing his revolver to cover the escape of his comrades, until stopped by an assegai thrust in the heart. Cavaye, Coghill, Melvill, Mostyn, Shepstone, Smith, Wardell: names that would live for all Eternity, if he, Septimus Doyle, had anything to do with it.
As well as the stories of bravery and dash, there were those that touched the heart: Younghusband (again) shaking hands with his surviving men before turning to face the foe for the last time; Private Wassall bearing his comrade Private Westwood to safety on his own horse; Colonel Durnford, in his red bandana, making his last stand upon the kopje—all these were real enough, if perhaps a little ‘touched up’ for the benefit of the sentimental public.

The reality had been very different, of course: there had been nothing poetic or inspiring about his first visit to Isandhlwana. Even now, he could not recall it without a shiver of disgust. He had seen men killed by the score in Afghanistan—their bodies blown to bits by heavy artillery fire—and considered himself inured to such horrors.
But he was unprepared for what he found here. The sheer scale of the carnage was something he had not met with before—that, and the fact that, four months on, the battlefield was now a charnel-house. Four months of heat and flies had done their work on these poor unburied corpses. What was left was both horrible and pathetic.
The stench was the first thing that alerted them to what they had come to. As he and his confreres—Forbes of the Daily News, and his colleague Prior—rode up, the burial party, consisting of General Marshall’s cavalry and some native auxiliaries, was already at work. Some of the men had tied handkerchiefs over their mouths and noses to block the smell, but this must have made little difference.
‘My God,’ said Prior, who had turned pale under his sunburn. ‘What a fearful mess.’
What became all too apparent, as they slowly circumnavigated the ruined camp—stumbling over the remains of its erstwhile defenders as they did so—was that this had been, not a battle, but a rout.
All across the broad plain, the skeletons of men and animals lay scattered. In the ravine, the dead lay thickest—tumbled over one another, in ghastly intimacy: their bodies, that had once moved, breathed, and felt the sun, now reduced to grisly cadavers, with skin toughened to the colour and consistency of leather, the flesh having wasted away.
Some—dismembered heaps of yellow bones, at which wild animals had evidently been at work—were scarcely recognisable as human. Others retained the semblance of men, petrified in attitudes of desperate flight and final agony. In their blackened and contorted features could be discerned traces of human expression, and the emotions written there were terrible.
‘Christ damn it all,’ said Forbes, into the silence. ‘I cannot show this.’
For the past hour, he had been making notes and sketches—as they all had—to record the principal features of the scene. Now he threw down his notebook. Septimus had come to the same conclusion: the horror of this could not be told at home.
He took out his cigarette-case and passed it to Forbes, after taking one for himself. The taste of the thing was foul, but it helped to kill the stink of corruption that rose all around them.
Prior had dismounted and now wandered distractedly around the field, pausing from time to time to examine objects that caught his eye. Amongst the bare bones and half-rotted remnants of a once proud uniform, were memorabilia of a different kind. One such fragment he handed to Septimus, without comment. It was a photograph of a young woman, of no particular beauty, with a child aged about two years old on her lap. On the back was an inscription: To dear darling Dadda.
Septimus looked at it for a while, then made to give it back, but Prior waved the thing away with a pained grimace.
‘Perhaps the General will have a use for it…’
And indeed the commanding officer had given orders that such items, where possible, were to be collected up, for distribution to the families.
Septimus nodded, and slipped the sun-faded image inside his notebook for safe-keeping—realising, as he did so, that he might have another use for it. The photograph was in fact still in his possession. The story he had written about the unknown infant pictured there and his ‘darling Dadda’ had been one of his more successful, he felt, with the faint stirring of self-disgust such occasional lapses of scruple aroused in him.