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152 pages

English

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Rebels appear and disappear as the story of the South Africa response to the Royal Navy's request that they destroy the wireless station at Windhoek in German South West Africa, now Namibia, continues. The South Africans must first deal with rebels in their own country and the government forces found themselves chasing the shadows of Kemp, De Wet and Beyers across the Veldt. Given the job of finding and dealing with Beyers, Koos Kruger, now Tom Clarke, is expendable and caught between President Botha and Jan Smuts, the Minister of Defence.

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Historical fiction

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Publié par	Andrews UK
Date de parution	02 novembre 2015
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781785383182
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0200€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Title Page
Shadows in the Veldt
Rebellion
Sullatober Dalton

Publisher Information
Published in 2015 by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
The right of Sullatober Dalton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998
Copyright © 2015 Sullatober Dalton
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Any person who does so may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Prologue
When war was declared on 3 rd August 1914, the German navy had warships around the globe. Admiral von Spee with Scharnhorst and Gneisenau was in the South Pacific - somewhere; Emden and Konigsburg were in the Indian Ocean - or the Persian Gulf, maybe. The submarines? They could be anywhere.
From a wireless station at Windhoek in German South West Africa, all these enemies drew information about shipping movements round the Cape of Good Hope; movements that included the tempting targets of the Australian troop ships on their way to the trenches in Flanders.
The Imperial War Cabinet asked the South African government if they would invade German South West Africa to silence the radio station. President Botha and Jan Smuts, the Minister of Defence, both old leaders of Boer forces in the Boer War, were convinced that they had been treated generously by the British Empire and their conscience called on them to repay that generosity with loyalty to that Empire. They agreed to help and called on the country to support them. Some did. Others believed they should defend South Africa but take no part in what they felt was a European affair; that if they left the Germans alone, the Germans would respect South Africa‘s integrity. Some others, extremists, Afrikaner mainly but including a fair smattering of English speakers, felt they should be with the Kaiser as he had supported them during the Boer war and, compared to the wimps in Westminster, would keep the Blacks in their place.
Botha carried parliament with him. Those, like Hertzog, who were fiercely opposed to his policy, were supported by the visions of the prophet, Seiner van Rensberg, and declared a holy war; the ordinary Boer might not have called it that, but their leaders called on God to intervene, to drive the heathen English, who wanted to forbid them beating their own Kaffirs, from South Africa.
The result was that, in 1914, the fever of rebellion broke out in South Africa and the army were chasing - Shadows in the Veldt.

Chapter 1
LONDON
In London, in November of 1914, a round faced man with a pugnacious expression sat with several others at a big table covered with papers. They were being addressed by the Secretary of State for War, a man with magnificent moustaches in a Field Marshall’s uniform.
The Field Marshall looked at the chubby man. ‘So, your friend, Smuts, hasn’t dealt with that radio mast the Germans have at Windhoek that your Navy are so worried about?’
The round faced man sat forward but instead of replying to the military man, spoke to the man at the head of the table. ‘It’s rather a chicken and egg situation, Prime Minister. We can’t risk moving troop ships from Cape Town until we have dealt with the wireless. It reports every move in and around the Cape. Any German raider, especially a fleet of ships like von Spee’s, or a submarine in the South Atlantic, or even from up the East coast of Africa, could turn up and sink any ship that coaled, or even stopped, at one of the ports. On the other hand, we can’t deal with the radio mast until we get troops there.’
‘Do you know where von Spee is?’
The chubby man sighed but pushed his chin forward aggressively. ‘No! If Craddock had shadowed them instead of trying to be Nelson and sink the blighter at Coronel, we’d have known. Von Spee may have turned into the South Atlantic or doubled back to the American West Coast. I’ve sent reinforcements down to the Falklands and all we can do is wait until he sends a recognisable radio signal, or stumbles into one of our own ships.’
The military man puffed out his moustaches. ‘So, you and young Smuts are no further forward...’
‘No, Field Marshall! But the delay has given your old friend, President Botha, a chance to deal with his rebellion. His people have already given the Germans a rap over the knuckles and sent them back into German West Africa with their tails between their legs. All while you and the French have been digging that drainage ditch all the way from Switzerland to the North Sea. It’s a great pity we couldn’t get them to dig a canal from Glasgow to London. It would be over in a week.’
The man at the head of the table tapped his fountain pen on the table. ‘I’m afraid there’s rather more to it than the radio mast, Field Marshall. The rebels threaten our supply of copper from Rhodesia, copper we need to make cartridges for your guns. So far, the rebels have confined their activities to cutting the railway line. It’s inconvenient, but easily fixed, and Botha has armoured trains patrolling. In addition, as you well know, when they cut the telephone, or the railway, Botha knows where they are and can track them down. It’s this Kemp on the loose he’s worried about; he may have as many as ten thousand Boers with him. He’s gone west, but is he just running to the Germans in South West, or does he intend to set up a naval base along the West Coast. It would make things damned awkward if they could shelter submarines down there.’
SOUTH AFRICA
In South Africa, the shadow of Kemp hung heaviest over the North West region of the Cape Colony. He had come from the north east, from the Transvaal. Leaving others to disrupt the railway that ran north to the Rhodesian copper mines, he had overrun David Livingstone’s old home at Kuruman and was now on his way to... where?
He was thought to be making for German South West to link up with Martiz’s group and invade South Africa with German help. He might, however, be heading for the isolated copper mines around Springbok. He might even, the more imaginative surmised, intend to set up a submarine hide-out in Saldanha Bay or the Langebaan Lagoon among the West Coast sands, a hundred miles north of Cape Town.
***
For Lieutenant Tom Clarke, life went on, and, the weather being fine, in other words, the wind wasn’t blowing sand in their faces, Rebecca Fourie had insisted on making a picnic in the veldt. She had refused to stop until Tom Clarke and she had ridden eight miles out of Upington.
While the men in London argued, Rebecca was asking Tom why he had to tell his ‘sister’, coming from England to visit Kimberley, that he wasn’t really Tom Clarke.
Tom, a little over average height, broad shouldered and fit in his khaki uniform and wide brimmed hat, rose in annoyance to scan the horizon. Hopefully, there wasn’t much chance of an ambush this close to Upington. After their beating there, Maritz and his German friends had made off to German South West Africa licking their wounds. BUT - people like Maritz, and especially the devious Kemp, had a habit of simply appearing out of desolate wastes or apparently empty farmland.
People thought this part of the country, half way between the Kalahari Desert and the semi desert Karoo, was flat. Compared to the mountains of the Cape or Natal, it was, but it was no more flat than a piece of wet newspaper that had warped dry in the sun. There were long swells and shallow hollows and the occasional dry riverbed, washed a few inches deep, or, in some cases, enough to hide a man, by freak rain and hail storms that flooded the area - every twenty years or so. The ‘farms’ of the sandy scrubland were miles apart and a man who knew the country could pass through it unreported - even with the thousand men Kemp was supposed to have with him. So many would raise a big cloud of dust but, in the afternoon mirage, things were so distorted you could never be sure.
As he swept the horizon, Tom could feel his ire rise. The average Afrikaner might resent British rule but accepted it, just as they accepted the rule of their strict Calvinistic church. It was the extremists, like Swart in Pretoria, who stoked resentment into the heat of hatred. Of course, there were some of the younger rebels, and some of Botha’s loyalist group as well, who got caught up in the excitement and went on Kommando. Tom had discovered that despite being able to down a running springbok, their idea of ‘Kommando’ was to make as much noise firing off their rifles in the general direction of their opponents until one side or the other rushed off. One man had approached a band of loyalists and asked who they were going to fight, Germans or English? When he was told it was between Botha and de Wet he simply said he was glad he was with Botha. In some ways, it was a struggle to prove which of the old kommando leaders was best at manoeuvring and riding. If it wasn’t for the dead, Tom thought, it would make a comic opera, like one of those Gilbert and Sullivan things they put on in Kimberley.
But there were dead bodies and Tom tapped his leg in annoyance, screwed his eyes and intensified his search, eager to find and trap Kemp and his gang.
Rebecca fidgeted and broke his concentration and his mind turned to his ‘other’ problem. The real Tom Clarke was dead and his body had been buried in Kim