“Wait . . . Aletta.”
I looked up, surprised to see him. I looked at his unattended rifle. He saw me notice it. Maybe this was his trap.
“Oh, please, you could nick it right now . . . and shoot me in the foot or the leg, too, please. I could say I was hit by a sniper from outside the camp, and they might send me home . . . with a medal, even. Or maybe you could take this thing and trade it for one of the Mausers your men use . . . much better.”
I looked into his eyes, the way Mother did when she searched for reflections of falsehood.
“I hate the thing. . . . It’s so heavy,” he said. “Never shot one until I joined.”
It was easier to see him as something other than a soldier when his rifle was not in hand. He was just a young man in a uniform and did not seem comfortable in it at that.
“At least I don’t have to do anything with it except carry it around in here,” he said.
He hadn’t mentioned being in actual battle, in the line of fire, shooting at our men. But that’s what he now implied.
“You were out there?”
“For a while, fighting the ‘wily’ Boers—that’s what the officers called them,” he said. “Always something up their sleeves.”
“Oh?”
“We followed some up to a farmhouse, but they disappeared. We asked the old man there where the Boers were hiding. In the queen’s English, he said he was from a British family and would be happy to help us find the bleedin’ Boers. He wanted us to do away with the lot of ’em. He told us to go one way and follow some dingus or dongus or some nonsense, and we’d find their camp.”
“And?”
“We rode down a little stream channel and they jumped us. . . . The old man sent us into an ambush. . . . We were all lined up in a row nice and neat for them to pick us off.”
“Ah . . . uitoorlê,” I said. “That’s our word for ‘outfoxed.’ ”
“Rude, don’t you think?”
“What, someone being ungentlemanly in war?”
“Oh, we learned that,” he said. “Some would wave the white flag, and when a column came up to get ’em, they pulled down and shot ’em up.”
“I don’t believe that,” I said, but then I thought of some who were capable of it.
“There were times when we’d bivouac in tall grass and the Boers would set fire to it all, and we’d suddenly be running for our lives and get confused by all the smoke, and bullets would just come ripping in at all angles, not caring a bit what they hit,” he said. “I found a low spot and flattened out inside it. I was in there cozy when an officer jumped in, too. Couldn’t believe they were just firing into the smoke. Officer said something I’ll never forget: ‘Nothing blind as a bullet.’ ”
These were not the stories I heard from our men. It sounded like the experience of Ouma van Zyl, except these blind bullets were being fired by the other side. I soured at the topic and it must have shown. I started walking.
“Wait,” he said. “It’s not all like that.” This soldier, this boy, seemed aching to talk, as if he had no one else in the whole British army who would listen to him.
“We heard of one of your men who was so sad about killing one of ours, he was on his knees praying so hard for him that we just walked up and took him prisoner. We saw others risk their lives to save their friends. Unbelievably brave . . . racing through open fire to rescue a wounded man. Some helped wounded Tommies . . . sheltered a man from the sun, or gave him their last canteen of water. There’s some fine men . . . and there’s scoundrels . . . like our army.”
“Like the ones who called us spies?”
“Who is that?”
“Your commandant . . .” I stopped in case Maples might be in league with the commandant.
I could not imagine Maples among those setting fire to our house. Most of the time, he didn’t seem to know a war was being conducted. His talk this day was the first that caused me to imagine him involved in anything more dangerous than breaking up a hen fight among caged women. But each time I readied to tear into him, he deprived me of the pleasure by agreeing with me.
“You say our rifles are better?”
“By a sight . . . magazine load . . . smokeless powder,” he said. “You can’t see where the bullets are coming from. . . . Just start flying past. You don’t need to hear about all this. It’s not good for you . . . or anybody.”
“Maybe I’ll write about it someday.”
“You can ask your men about it.”
“That’s just one side of it.”
He smiled a bit; I think he liked for a moment to think of himself as more than just the guardian of the eastern fence line.
“This little bit, then. Your men never miss. . . . Make every cartridge count. They hide in those trenches and just start plucking us when we ride up. Officers had never seen such a thing, troops popping up from the ground with no warning.”
“The warthog backs into its hole so it can come out fighting,” I said. “My brother Schalk told me that.”
“Well, it works. Our officers said we underestimated your men . . . especially the way they know the land. One captain said that as your numbers go down, the quality of the men fighting goes up, and as our numbers go up, the quality of our soldiers goes down.”
I thought of Oom Sarel coming to camp while Oupa, Vader, and Schalk were still fighting. It proved Maples’s theory.
“The prisoners I saw were very solemn . . . never a curse word or threat,” he said. “They weren’t all very bright, and they smelled like rotting meat, but they were very pious . . . praying every night and singing hymns. One night . . .”
“What?”
“Sure . . . here’s a story for you to write about,” he said. “Sometimes one side or the other would call for an armistice to collect the wounded . . . or what have you . . . and we’d just rest in our camps with a holiday from war. We did that one afternoon and then the evening cooled and the moon came up full, making everything silver. Across the valley, in their camp, the Boers started singing. We couldn’t believe we could hear them so clearly.”
“They always sing,” I said. “Usually hymns.”
“That was it . . . and we recognized the hymn right off . . . ‘Old Hundredth’ . . . like a church choir on the other side of the clearing. Some of our men then joined in, too. Then all of us. We were all singing together; they could hear us and we could hear them. It was beautiful. I’ll never forget that afternoon and evening.”
“Then what?”
“When the clock ticked over to the end of the armistice, we could hear the breech bolts of Mausers start clicking. . . . Time to go back to work.”
“Right then?”
“In the morning . . . but I kept thinking about that time.” He sang in a timid voice: You faithful servants of the Lord,
Sing out his praise with one accord,
While serving him with all your might
And keeping vigil through the night.