Even my brother, in one of his rare letters, had written on the day war was declared: ‘We’ve just heard the news and by the time this reaches you I expect you’ll have joined up, so I want to hasten to wish you God speed. I can’t, of course, go with you all. Someone has to stay behind and grow food, and I expect it’s right that a bloke like me should be the “someone”. I can only promise you that the thought of what thousands of gallant chaps like you will be doing for the stay-at-homes will make me work harder than ever. I have already thought of a way of bringing new land under the plough that will double, if not treble, our yield. I don’t expect you’ll have time to come all this way to visit us and I am sure it would be wrong for me to press you, but please remember, always, that you’re constantly in our thoughts and prayers. Write when you’ve a moment and God bless you, Ouboet.’
You see? In doing what I’d done I was fulfilling even my brother’s expectations of me. No wonder that, for the moment, I was composed, even content. Yet I never answered the letter. I put it off from day to day and in the end merely sent him a telegram on the day I embarked.
I shall pass over the weeks of training that followed, the detail of embarkation with the first division of infantry and our voyage to the battlefields of North Africa. I do so not because that period is without interest but because it is irrelevant to my story. I am concerned only with betrayal, with the seed of negation within me, with a particular botany both of my own and of the human spirit, and in that connexion I have nothing further to add until I come to my first taste of action. The action was not much of an affair except to me and my battalion. My role in it, moreover, was of my own choosing and execution. For days our Directors of Intelligence had been complaining about the dearth of prisoners to give them information. We were new in the field and took their urging more seriously than we might have done later on. My Colonel seemed profoundly bothered about the whole thing and so I volunteered one night to take out a special patrol and collect the bodies Intelligence wanted.
The offer was accepted gladly and again I was struck by how easily my mind planned and carried out the operation. It was as if I had done it all a thousand times before. That, coupled with my lifetime’s experience in stalking the game of my native land made the task seem elementary and the success a certainty. After observing an advanced post of the enemy for some days, procuring a couple of aerial photographs of it, personally reconnoitring at night the ground between us and it, I crawled one moonless midnight out of our position with a section of seven hand-picked men behind me.
Within half an hour, still undetected, we were close to our target. The tide of a not unpalatable excitement ran high in my blood. I felt rejuvenated, my emotions as fresh and vivid as the day, nearly twenty years before, when I had stalked and killed my first Kudu bull. I halted my patrol and turned on my back to rest making sure we were all in full breath before going in to capture and kill the outpost whose low parapet was looming darkly before us like the outline of the backs of a bunch of ruminating kine. I remarked that the stars too were participating in the venture and trembling on the tips of their toes with excitement. In this strange northern sky they were mostly strangers to me and all appeared in the wrong places but, as if for encouragement, there was my favourite constellation the great hunter Orion gliding smoothly with his Red Indian swing through the black wings on the edge of the Milky Way, unheeding of the clear song and bright twitter of lesser stars on the bright stage before him. I do not think I had ever known a purer or more complete moment than I did then. I mention it because I think now that it was all part of the greater plan to perfect and refine the irony of what had to follow.
All around us the desert, so appropriately a setting for battle in the bankrupt spirit of man, was oddly still. As I lay there the noise of an aeroplane coming fast towards us from behind the enemy lines broke in on the quietude.
‘We’ll go in the moment it’s overhead,’ I whispered to my men. ‘It’ll drown the sound of our movements. But get this clear. You three come first with your knives. You others follow covering with your guns; no shooting if we can help it.’
I turned over. Knife in my right hand I rose softly into position like a runner braced for the starter’s pistol on the edge of the track. Three dark shapes conformed beside me. The plane was flying low and fast towards us. Just before it was overhead I said ‘Now!’ and leapt forward. The enemy position was only a shallow machine-gun pit scraped out of the hard desert rubble. My hand briefly on the parapet I cleared it at the run and landed in the midst of a platoon of sleeping enemy soldiers. My feet barely touched bottom when the aeroplane dropped a landing flare almost immediately overhead. Instantly the shallow pit and its huddle of dusty little men and the desert far and wide around us were illuminated with a bright magnesium glare. The sentry leaning against the bank by the parapet was struggling out of a desperate sleep, terror on his face. In the strange phosphorescent light floating down from above us, I could see every line on his unshaven face. He was a small dark man, his face broad and his eyes wide-open to the horror quaking within him. Something in me hardened instantly at the sight of him, as if he were not a reality of war without but a puppet in a shadow-show against the ecto-plasmic light of my own mind. He raised his rifle, perhaps, to protect himself and he tried to call out, perhaps, that he was surrendering. The sound was strangled in his throat. I have always been exceptionally fast in my physical reaction to situations. Although this takes time in the telling, it all passed off in one continuous movement. I leapt at him and before he was clear of the bank had ducked past his rifle, pinned him against the earth and driven my knife into him beneath his ribs with a swift upward thrust and all my weight and speed behind it. For one infinitesimal fragment of time a terrible stillness fell between us, the sort of stillness no doubt wherein God’s monitors at their listening post at the exit of the world could hear a sparrow fall or even the first faint footstep of evil setting out on its labyrinthine way. In the midst of that stillness I heard his skin squeak at the point of my knife and then snap like elastic. A look like the brush of a crow’s wing passed over his face – and for a moment he reminded me of my own brother. Flashes of visions of my brother, Stompie, the woman crying under the Royal Palm came and went in my mind like children playing hide and seek in the twilight. They vanished just in time. My men were following my own example like automatons, attacking with their knives the terrified men coming out of their sleep with upraised hands. I had to stop them at once. More I feared the fever of killing would upset the four covering us with their guns. Once they opened up there would be no survivors and our chances of getting back to our lines greatly diminished. As I ordered them to stop the landing flare went out and thank God a generous fall of blackness covered us all. We disarmed the seventeen enemy soldiers still alive. We made them take off their boots and marched them in their socks deftly back to our lines. My men went behind purring like kittens with their triumph. I went like someone profoundly preoccupied walking unaware with one foot on a pavement, the other in a gutter; one mind content with my men in that moment; another hopeless and strangely defeated in another epoch of time. In that time-gutter of my own, the prisoners in front of me seemed freer than I, I, a prisoner of myself and my own gaoler. Was this war waged in a cause of which I had had such ardent expectations, to show itself in my first encounter not to be the battlefield I sought? Would it not enable me to do the killing I needed? Was it about to cheat me merely into murdering enemy proxies of my own brother, and be but another turn of the same meaningless screw?