Читать книгу Reports from the Boer War - Edgar Wallace - Страница 15
ОглавлениеReproduced from The Star (New Zealand), June 1, 1901
DE AAR
Evening at De Aar. An awed hush has fallen upon a place of great unquiet, for there is stern, grim work afoot, and the breathlessness of impending tragedy has brought a sombrous peacefulness.
There is no clanking crash of shunting trucks, no whistle of engine, no clatter of detraining troops. De Aar stands, still and is silent in the face of the quick of the one minute; who shall be the dead of the next? The hills about are mellowing in the golden haze of eventide, and night will come very quickly.
But the men who are falling in quietly before De Aar's many tents are not preparing for night picket, and as they march silently off to the east of the camp you can see they number too many for the ordinary routine duties. Silently they march, no badinage from file to file, no lightly-given jest, but each man marching with grave face and that set look that comes to the soldier when man's work is required of him. As silently they form into hollow square and wait. They form three aides only, and on the fourth are three chairs placed at intervals, and before each chair is an ominous slit in the earth.
Where the even, sullen, kopjes are most gloomy, and the gaunt rands* with boulder-bristling backs are most foreboding, is Taaibosch. De Aar, and even the hills that mark De Aar, are out of view, and Taaibosch stands solitary, a dejected, eerie little siding amidst great vastness. North of Taaibosch siding, towards De Aar, the line threads along for a hundred yards between gaping ballast holes. It is a weird, wild country, although the driver of the goods train that left Taaibosch siding a month ago could see little more than a dozen yards before his engine.
rand (Afrikaans)—a rock-strewn area of land. ]
THE CRIME
It was night; the rainy, gusty night when the driving wheels slip on the greasy metals and the snorting engine emits steamy roars protestingly.
If it was uncomfortable for the driver and his mate, it was worse for the few soldiers crouching under tarpaulin, or sheltering themselves as well as they could beneath the Cape carts and waggons on the open trucks behind. Worse for them; for the fine, searching rain insinuated itself through crack and crevice, rent and tear. But the streaming road led to De Aar, and beyond De Aar was Cape Town, and beyond was England, for they were invalided soldiers homeward bound.
On a farm near the ballast holes were six men unconsciously enjoying all the privileges incidental and peculiar to registered voters of his Majesty's Colony of the Cape of Good Hope. They were Dutch, and naturally they were—well, they sympathised with the erstwhile republics. Commandoes had passed through the district, but they had not joined, perhaps because they ware afraid of disfranchisement, possibly because they could not afford to pay the £10 they would be fined for shooting soldiers. Now, they were resolved upon a great deed, something heroic—and safe.
They would wreck a train.
So they chose a goods train, which, would be more or less unattended, and was considerably less dangerous to tackle than a troop- or armoured train—the passengers of which have an unpleasant habit of searching the darkness around by means of low-aimed volleys.
The driver of the goods train knew nothing of their intentions, nor his mate, nor the crouching soldiers beneath the waggons.
And so there was murder.
An overturned engine, with a dying fireman lying between tender and boiler; a wrecked train with brave men pinned helplessly and dying like beetles on a pin. A roaring, scalding, tumbled wreck, with dropping shots from the gallant wreckers. A slaughtering of defenceless natives, an emptying of dead men's purses, and a great stealing of money. This happened a month—ago, and Taalbosch as beyond the hills crimsoning southward.
PAYMENT
The murderers are coming up from the gaol on an ambulance, and the firing parties marshal before the chairs.
Death will come sudden, but it will be painless. For them no entanglement in shot-bored wreckage. No lingering on, hoping against hope for timely succour. No impotent struggling for life in the awful darkness.
They have had a trial, where they stood white and anxious, or sullen and lowering, between two Guardsmen who fixed bayonets. They had seen their comrade who had turned King's evidence slip in and out the door—a little, pasty-faced man with a fringe of whisker—a man who kept has eyes averted from the faces of the men he had destroyed, and mouthed hideous grimaces in his nervousness. They had waited for the decision of the Court, and it had come: death for three, penal servitude for two, freedom for the informer.
They had made a mistake, and they were to suffer. They had thought it was a part of the game of war.
War was to them as the suspension of order. Murder was war, theft was war, train-wrecking was war. War gave them license to slay and burn and steal. They saw, with many hundreds of their fellows in the Cape Colony, an opportunity for doing something with impunity for which, in peace time, the penalty would be death.
"Murder, high treason, robbery!"
In clear tones the commandant reads out the crimes for which they are to suffer.
I do not like to think of the Yeoman pinned down with a bolt through his side and dying slowly and consciously and alone, and it is not Christian-like to let it rise in one's mind as the three men, alighting from the ambulance, are blindfolded and led to the chairs.
The sun drops behind the hill, and one last ray gleams along the barrels of the levelled trifles and bathes the murderers in a flood of golden light.
