Текст книги "Men of Men"

Автор книги: Wilbur Smith

Соавторы: Wilbur Smith
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When he came in, he would have that savage look on his face that made something flutter in the pit of her stomach, and it took all her will not to run to him, but to wait for him to come to her.

"By God, Katie my girl," he said to her once as he leaned on his elbow over her, the sweat still glistening on his naked chest, and his breathing as rough as though he had run a race, "you may look like an angel, but you could teach the devil himself a trick or two."

Though she prayed afterwards for strength to control the wanton sensations and cravings of her body, the prayers were perfunctory and lacked real conviction, and that lovely smug and contented feeling just would not go away.

With Ralph it was excitement all the time, day and night, when they were alone and when they were in company. She loved to watch the deference with which other men treated him, rich and famous men older than he was like Colonel Pennefather and Doctor Leander Starr Jameson, who were the leaders of the column. But then, she told herself, so they should. Ralph was already a director of the Chartered Company, mister Rhodes" British South Africa Company, and when he sat down at the boardroom table in the De Beers building, it was in the company of lords and generals and of mister Rhodes himself, though Ralph grinned and told her wickedly, "Great men, Katie, but not one of them whose feet don't stink in hot weather, same as mine."

A "You are awful, Ralph Ballantyne," she scolded, but she felt all puffed up with pride when she overheard two troopers talking of him and one said: "Ralph Ballantyne, there's a man for you, and no mistake."

Then at night, after they had made boisterous unashamed love, they would talk in the darkness, sometimes through most of the night, and his dreams and plans were the more enchanting for she knew that he would make them come true.

Her personal rapture was heightened by the mood of the seven hundred men around her, and each day's restraint as they waited for the word to move off increased the tension which gripped them all. Ralph's oxen brought up the guns, two seven-pounders, and the artillery fired shrapnel over the deserted veld beyond the camp, while the watchers cheered them as the fleecy cotton pods of smoking death opened prettily in the clear dry air.

The four Maxim machine-guns were unpacked from their cases and de-greased, and then, on a memorable day, the monstrous steam engine came chugging into the encampment, dragging behind it the electric generator and the naval searchlight which would be just another precaution against night attack by the Matabele hordes.

That night as she lay in his arms, Cathy asked Ralph the question they were all asking one another.

"What will Lobengula do?"

"What can he do?" Ralph stroked her hair, the way he might caress a favourite puppy. "He has signed the concession, taken his gold and guns, and promised Papa the roa d to Mashonaland."

"They say he has eighteen thousand men waiting across the Shashi."

"Then let them come, Katie, my lass. There are not a few amongst us who would welcome the chance to teach King Ben's buckaroos a sharp lesson."

"That's a terrible thing to say," she said without conviction.

"But it's the truth, by God."

She no longer chided him when he blasphemed so lightly, for the days and ways of Khami Mission seemed to be part of a fading dream.

Then one day, early in July of 1890, the mirror of a heliograph winked its eye across the dusty, sun-washed distances. It was the word for which they had waited all these months. The British Foreign Secretary had at last approved the occupation of Mashonaland by the representatives of the British South Africa Company.

The long ponderous column uncoiled like a serpent.

At its head rode Colonel Pennefather in company uniform, and at his right hand the guide Frederick Selous, whose duty it would be to take the column wide of any Matabele settlements, to cross the low malarial lands before the rains broke and to lead them up the escarpment to the sweet and healthy airs of the high plateau.

The Union Jack unfurled above their heads and a bugler sounded the advance.

"Heroes every one of them," Ralph grinned at Cathy.

"But it's up to the likes of me to see our heroes through."

His shirtsleeves were rolled high on his muscled arms and a disgracefully stained hat was cocked over one eye.

"When I come back, we'll be richer by eighty thousand pounds," he told her, and lifted her off the ground with his embrace.

"Oh Ralph, how I wish I were coming with you."

"You know mister Rhodes has forbidden any women to cross the frontier, and you'll be a damned sight safer and more comfortable at Lily's Hotel in Kimberley with Jordan to keep an eye on you."

"Then be careful, my darling," she cautioned him, breathless from his hug.

"No need for that, Katie, my sweet. The devil looks after his own."

"These are not men coming to dig holes." Gandang stood forth from the circle of indunas. "They are dressed as soldiers; they bring guns that can break down the granite hills with their smoke."

"What did the king promise Lodzi?" demanded Bazo. at he may come in peace to look for gold. Why does he march against us like an army?"

Bazo spoke for the young men. "Oh great King, the spears are bright and our eyes are red. We are fifteen thousand men; can the king's enemies stand against us?"

Lobengula looked at his handsome eager young face.

sometimes the most dangerous enemy is a hasty heart," he said, softly.

"And at other times, Bull Elephant of Kurnalo, it might be a tardy spear arm."

A shadow of irritation at importunate youth passed behind the king's eyes; then he sighed. "Who knows?" he agreed. "Who knows where the enemy lies?"

"The enemy lies before you, great King; he has crossed the Shashi river and he has come to take your land from you," Somabula told him. And then Gandang stood again: "Let the spears go, Lobengula, Son of Mzilikazi, let your young men run, or as the sun will rise tomorrow, that surely will you live to regret it."

"That I cannot do," Lobengula said softly. "Not yet. I cannot use the assegai when words may still suffice." He roused himself and his voice firmed.

"Go, Gandang, my brother, take your hot-hearted son with you. Go to the leader of these soldiers and ask him why he comes into my lands in battle array, and bring his answer to me here."

Frederick Selous rode ahead, a trooper with an axe following him, and he pointed out the trees to be cut.

The trooper blazed them with a slash of the axe, and followed Selous on. The axemen came up behind them, fifty of them, riding in pairs. One man dismounted, handed his reins to his partner, spat on his already callused hands and, hefting the axe, addressed himself to the trunk of the doomed tree.

While his axe thudded and the wood chips flew white as bone in the sunlight, the second man sat in the saddle, his rifle in his hands, and he watched the forest around him for the first plumed head and long tasselled shield to appear. When the tree crackled and toppled, the axeman mounted and they rode on to the next, where he took his turn on guard while his mate swung the axe. Behind them the bullock spans came plodding to chain the fallen trunks and drag them out of the road, and then the whole ponderous caravan rumbled forward.

It was slow work, and on the third day Ralph rode to the head of the column to discuss with Selous the possibility of using the steam engine to haul the smaller trees, roots and all, from the sandy earth. They had left their horses with a trooper and walked forward for a better view of the way ahead when Ralph said quietly: "Stand your ground, mister Selous. Do not draw your pistol, and, in God's name, do not show any agitation."

There were dark and moving shadows in the forest all around them, and then suddenly the dreaded long shields were there, forming a wall across their front.

"Has the king killed any white ment" a deep voice challenged. "If he has not, then why has this impi of warriors crossed his border?"

Tobengula has killed nobody," Ralph called back.

"Then have the white men mislaid something of value that they come to seek it here?" Ralph said quietly to Selous. "I know this man. He is one of the king's senior indunas. The one with the red shield behind him is his son; between them they disposed of eight thousand men. It would be as well to tread warily, mister Selous. We are surrounded by an army."

Then he addressed himself to the watching and waiting warriors: "The king has given us the road."

"The king denies that he called an army to enter his domain."

"We are not an army," Ralph denied, and Gandang threw back his head and laughed briefly and bitterly.

Then he spoke again: "Hear me, Henshaw, no white man steps beyond this place without the word of Lobengula. Tell that to your masters."

Ralph whispered briefly with Selous, and then faced Gandang again.

"We will wait," he agreed, "for the king's word."

"And we will watch while you wait," Gandang promise ominously, and at a gesture the warriors melted away into the forest again and it seemed they had never been.

"Pull in the pickets," Colonel Pennefather ordered. "Put the wagons into laager. Ballantyne, can you get a message back to Tuhon the heliograph and have someone post up to Gubulawayo to find what are Lobengula's real intentions." And, as Ralph turned to hurry away, "Oh, one other thing, Ballantyne, can you start the generator and have the searchlight ready to sweep the area around the camp tonight. We don't want those fellows creeping up on us in the dark."

Gandang and his son stood together on the crest of one of the little rocky kopjes that dotted the wide hot plain between the rivers.

They were alone, although when Bazo turned his head and looked down the steep back-slope of the hill, he could see the bivouac of their combined impis. There were no cooking fires to disclose their presence to the white men; they would eat cold rations and sleep in darkness this night. The long, black ranks squatted with enforced patience, dense as hiving bees beneath the shading branches of the mopani.

Bazo knew that he had only to lift his right arm above his shield to bring them to their feet and send them racing away, silent and ferocious as hunting leopards, and the thought gave him a savage joy. Reluctantly he turned back, and stood quietly with his shield not quite touching his father's.

The little afternoon breeze coming up from the river stirred their war plumes, and they gazed down upon the laager of the white men.

The bullocks had been penned within the circle of the wagons, and they could see the field guns and the Maxim machine-guns posted at the points of the barricade, their positions fortified with biscuit boxes and Ammunition cases from the wagonloads. The gun crews lounged near their weapons, yet somehow the whole scene appeared tranquil and unwarlike.

"In the dark hour before the dawn, we could take them before they could stand to their guns," murmured Bazo.

"It would be so quick, so easy."

"We will wait on the king's word," his father replied, and then started and exclaimed.

"What is it, my father?"

Gandang lifted his assegai and pointed with it southwards, to the pale blue horizon, far beyond the Shashi river, to the faint line of hills, shaped as fantastically as the turreted towers of a fairy castle.

On those far pale hills, something flickered and sparkled, a tiny speck of brightest white light, like a fire-fly in flight, or like the twinkle of the morning star.

"The stars," Gandang whispered with superstitious awe, "the stars are shining on the hills."

The little group of officers stood behind the tripod of the instrument and focused their telescopes on the distant twinkle of light.

The heliograph operator called the message aloud, at the same time scribbling it on his signal pad. "Jove advises hold your position pending clarification Lobengula's intention." Jove was the code for mister Rhodes.

"Very well." Pennefather closed his telescope with a snap. "Acknowledge message received and understood."

The operator bent to the prism of the instrument and made a minute adjustment in its focus, turning one mirror to catch the sunlight and the second to reflect it directly towards the line of distant hills; then he seized the handle and the shutter clattered as it blinked the beam of sunlight, speeding the dots and dashes of the Morse code instantaneously across fifty miles of wilderness.

Pennefather turned away and crossed briskly to the massive steam engine on its tall steel wheels. He looked up at Ralph on the footplate.

"Are you ready to light up, Ballantyne?"

Ralph removed the long black cheroot from between his teeth, and gave a parody of a military salute.

"Weve got sixty pounds of pressure on the boiler.

Another half hour and she'll be whistling out of the valve."

"Very well." Pennefather hid his mystification. He neither understood nor admired these demoniacal contraptions "Just as long as we have light by nightfall."

Gandang sat on his shield with his fur kaross of monkey skins over his shoulders. The winter evenings were cold, even here in the lowlands. There were no fires in the bivouac, and he could barely make out the faces of his junior commanders who sat opposite him, for the last flush of the sunset was fading from the western sky. "It was something that all of us saw, and something that we have never seen before."

They murmured agreement.

"It was a star, fallen from the heavens, and it lay upon the hills. We all saw it."

"In the morning I will send two of our swiftest runners to the king. He must know of this terrible witchcraft."

He stood up and let his kaross fall. "Now I am going He did not finish the sentence.

Instead he dropped into a defensive crouch and flung up his shield to cover his head, and around him his warriors wailed like frightened children, their eyes wide and white, glinting in the flood of light that burst down upon them from the sky.

The evening stars were washed out by the brilliance of the great white beam that reached from earth to heaven, and threw the hills into crisp black silhouette.

"The sun has returned," Gandang croaked in religious terror. "It is the prophecy, the whole prophecy. The stone falcons have flown, the stars shine on the hills, and now the sun burns at midnight."

Fort Salisbury 20th Sept. 1890 My darling Kate, Over two months since last I kissed you, and I am missing your cooking, amongst other things!

You will see by the address that we have reached our destination, although we lost a man drowned, another to drink, a third bitten by a mamba and a fourth eaten by a lion, the Matabele touched not one of us.

So Lobengula kept his word, to the surprise of all, and the disappointment of not a few. After one exchange of insults with old Gandang at the head of 8,000 of his bully boys, they let us pass, and the rest of it was rather tedious, just sweat and blisters!

The great Selous almost lost us once, but then I showed him the pass through the hills which Isazi and I found when we made our little foray to Great Zimbabwe. Selous called it Providential Pass (providential that I was with him, I'd say), and he took the kudos (to which he is welcome). He will probably write another book about his feat!

We reached Mount Hampden on the 6th instant, and it gave me a turn to think that Papa had been the first man here all those years ago.

However, Pennefather, in his great wisdom, decided there was insufficient water there and moved us all twelve miles across here. Of course the man is a new chum, fresh out from home, so how is he to know that this place will turn into a swamp with the first rains.

"I intend to be well away by then!) I have visited some God-forsaken places on my travels, but this one gets the coconut! It's infested with lions, and I've lost 15 oxen to them already. The grazing is sour-!" and, the remaining beasts are losing condition, oh, how I long for the sweet-veld of Matabeleland. Trust the Matabele to pick the best stock country, so I'll not be too surprised when others start thinking about Lobengula's herds and pastures. If only the cunning old brighter had thrown his war spear and given us the excuse, we might be hoisting the flag over Gubulawayo now, rather than over this dreary spot.

Oh well! At least I am the only one here with whisky, two wagonloads of it, and doing a roaring trade at 10 shillings the bottle. You shall have the prettiest bonnet in Kimberley when I return, Katie my heart.

The day Pennefather hoisted the flag the boys were free to go their own way, and what a stampede there was! Everyone intent to be the first to peg the gold reef we've heard so much about. Some of them are crawling back already, tail between their legs. This is no Eldorado, if there is gold, they'll have to work for it, and then, of course, mister Rhodes and his British South Africa Company will take half of it. Of course, they all were happy enough about the Company's cut when they signed on, but they are starting to bellyache about it now.

We had a message on the "Helio" this morning that the British South Africa Company shares are selling for 3 pounds 5 shillings. each in London, and 5,000 new shareholders on the books in the first week. Well, all I can say is that whoever is paying that price has never seen Fort Salisbury!

"Young Ballantyne," says Leander Starr Jameson to me, "you were damnably lucky to take half your fees payable in B.S.A. shares valued at 1 pound each."

"Jarneson," says I, "it's strange how the harder I work and the harder I think, the luckier I get."

So I have 40,000 B.S.A. shares, Katie my love, and you will find here attached a letter addressed to Aaron Fagan, my solicitor in Kimberley, instructing him to sell every last one of them. Take it around to him posthaste, that's a good girl. We'll be well rid of them at a profit of 2 pounds 5 shillings each, and that's God's truth! Perhaps I'll buy you two bonnets when I come back!

Oh, if only we had Matabeleland, no wonder Lobengula left Mashonaland to the Mashonas! Though they don't call it that any more. The new name that is all the rage is Rhodesia, no less!

What an ungainly name it is, but no doubt mister Rhodes will be flattered and my brother Jordan will be delighted. They are welcome to my share of Rhodesia , Don't forget to take the letter to Fagan, mind!

Nonetheless, there is still a penny to be made here.

I have taken a partner, and we are building a General Store and Bar-room. He will run both businesses, as well as the Salisbury Depot for my wagons. He seems an honest lad, our Tom Meikle, and hard-working, so I have given him a wage of 5 pounds a month and ten percent of the profits, no point in spoiling him! just as cen soon as we get the building up and the stocks on the shelves, I will leave him to it and be on my way back to you.

mister Rhodes wants me to contract to erect the telegraph line from Kimberley to Fort Salisbury for him at a price Of 25,000 pounds I reckon there will be 10,000 pounds profit in it. You shall have three bonnets, Katie, I swear it to you!

I must leave here by the 10th of next month if I am to beat the rains. Once they start the mosquitoes are going to take over Fort Salisbury, and every river between here and the Shashi will be a flood that would break even Noah's heart.

Thus I expect to reach Kimberley by the end of October, so take a good look at the floor, Katie my sweet, for when I get there you will be looking at nought but the ceiling for a week, and my word on it!

Your loving husband, Ralph Ballantyne (Ex Major B.S.A. Police Retired!) We must have Matabeleland. It is as simple as that," said Zouga Ballantyne, and Jordan looked up sharply from his pad of Pitman's shorthand.

His father sat in one of the deep buttoned leather chairs facing mister Rhodes" desk. Beyond him the green velvet curtains were open and held with yellow tasselled ropes of silk. The view from this top floor of the De Beers Company buildings took in a wide sweep of the dry Griqualand plain dotted with camel-thorn trees, and closer to hand the stacking ground where the blue earth from the Kimberley mine was left to deteriorate in the brilliant sunshine before being made to yield up its precious diamonds.

Jordan had no eyes for the view now; his father's words had shocked him. But mister Rhodes merely hooded his eyes and slumped massively at his desk, gesturing for Zouga to continue.

"The Company shares are six shillings in London, against three pounds fifteen on the day we raised the flag at Fort Salisbury three years ago, " ,I know, I know," Rhodes nodded.

"I have spoken with the men that remain; I have spent the last three months travelling from Fort Victoria to Salisbury as you bid me. They won't stay, mister Rhodes.

They won't stay unless you let them go in and finish it."

"Matabeleland." Rhodes lifted his great shaggy head, and Jordan thought how terribly he had aged in these last three years. "Matabeleland," he repeated softly.

"They are sick of the constant menace of Lobengula's hordes upon their borders; they have convinced themselves that the gold they did not find in Mashonaland lies under Lobengula's earth; they have seen Lobengula's fat herds of choice cattle and compared them to their own lean beasts that starve on the thin sour veld to which they are restricted"

"Go on," Rhodes nodded.

"They know that to reach them the telegraph and the railroad must come through Matabeleland. They are sick to the guts with malaria and the constant fear of the Matabele. If you want to keep Rhodesia, you must give them Matabeleland."

"I have known this all along. I think we all have. Yet we must move carefully. We must be careful of the Imperial Factor, of Gladstone and of Whitehall." Rhodes stood up and began to pace back and forth before the shelves laden with leather-bound books titled in gold leaf.

"We need to prepare ourselves. You must remember, Ballantyne, that we have technically only the right to dig for gold. As long as Lobengula does not molest us, we cannot declare war upon him."

"But if Lobengula. were to interfere in any way with our people and their rights?"

"That would be another matter." Rhodes stopped in front of Zouga's chair. "Then I should certainly end his game for him."

"In the meantime the company's shares are six shillings each," Zouga reminded him.

"We need an incident," said Rhodes. "But in the meantime we have to prepare and I dare not put it on the wires. I want you to leave immediately for Fort Victoria to speak to Jameson. "Rhodes swung his big head towards Jordan. "Do not make notes of this, Jordan," he ordered, and Jordan dutifully lifted his pencil from the pad.

"Instruct Jameson to send me a series of telegrams on the new wires. Telegrams advising against war, that we can show the British Government and people when it is all over, but in the meantime tell him to prepare for war."

Rodes turned back to Jordan. "Take an instruction, Jordan. Sell fifty thousand B.S.A. Company shares for what they will fetch. Jameson must have what he needs to do the business. Tell him that, Ballantyne. I shall be behind him all the way, but we need an incident."

Ralph Ballantyne sat his horse on the heights of the escarpment which fell away before him, in a tumbled splendour of rocky hills and forests. The spring foliage turned the groves of msasa trees into clouds of pink and swelling scarlets, and the air was so clear and bright that he could pick out the telegraph line all the way to the horizon.

The wires were a gossamer thread that glistened red gold in the sunlight, so fragile, so insubstantial, that it seemed impossible that they ran, arrow straight, six hundred miles and more to meet the raithead at Kimberley.

Ralph's men had laid this line. The surveyors riding ahead to set up the beacons, the axemen following to clear the line, then the wagons bringing up the poles and finally the enormous spools of gleaming copper wire uncoiling endlessly.

Ralph had hired good men, paid them well, and visited them less than once a month. Yet he was proud as he saw the wires sparkle and thought of the importance and significance of this achievement.

Beside him his foreman cursed suddenly. "There it is!

The thieving bastards!" And he pointed to where the line of telegraph poles marched up the side of one forested hill. Ralph had thought that cloud shadow had dimmed the sparkle of the copper wire up this slope, but now when he focused his binoculars upon them he saw that the poles had been stripped bare.

"Come on," he said grimly, and rode forward. When they reached the bottom of the slope they found that one of the telegraph poles had been chopped through at the base, and felled like timber. The wires had been hacked IF through, and the scuff marks in the earth where it had been rolled into bundles had not yet been erased by the wind.

Slowly they rode on up the slope, and Ralph did not have to dismount to read the sign of bare feet.

"There were at least twenty of them," he said. "Women and children with them, a family outing, damn them to hell."

"It's the women that put them up to it" the foreman agreed. "That wire makes beautiful bracelets and bangles.

The black girls just love it."

At the top of the slope another telegraph pole had been felled and the wire snipped through, "They have got away with five hundred yards of wire," Ralph scowled. "But next time it could be five thousand.

Do you know who they are?"

The foreman shrugged. "The local Mashona chief is Matanka. His village is just the other side of the valley.

You can see the smoke from here., Ralph slipped his rifle out of its boot under his knee.

It was a magnificent new Winchester Repeater Model 1890 with his name engraved and chased with gold into the metal of the block. He levered a round into the breech.

"Let's go to see brother Matanka."

He was an old man, with legs like a stork and a cap of pure white wool covering his head. He trembled with fear and fell on his knees before this furious young white man with a rifle in his hand.

"Fifty head," Ralph told him. "And next time your people touch the wires it will be a hundred."

Ralph and his foreman cut the fattest cattle out of Matanka's herds and drove them ahead of them, up the escarpment and into the little white settlement of Fort Victoria which had grown up mid-way between the Shashi river and Fort Salisbury.

"All right," Ralph told his foreman. "You can take them from here. Turn them over to the auctioneer, we should get ten pounds a head for them."

"That will cover the cost of replacing the wires fifty times over," the foreman grinned.

"I don't believe in taking a loss when I don't have to," Ralph laughed. "Get on with you, I'll have to go down and square it with the gool doctor."

Doctor Jameson's office, as administrator of the Charterlands of the British South Africa Company, was a wood and iron building with an untidily thatched roof directly opposite the only canteen in Fort Victoria.

"Ah, young Ballantyne," Jameson greeted Ralph, and secretly enjoyed Ralph's frown of annoyance. He did not share the general high opinion of this youngster. He was too bumptious and too successful by a half, while physically he was all that Jameson was not; tall and broadshouldered, with a striking appearance and forceful Presence.

The wags were saying that one day Ralph Ballantyne would own the half of the Charterland that Rhodes did not already have his brand on. However, even Jameson had to grant that if you wanted something done, no matter how difficult, and if you wanted it done swiftly and thoroughly, and if you were prepared to pay top dollar, then Ralph Ballantyne was your man.

"Ah, Jameson." Ralph retaliated by dropping the mousy little doctor's title from the greeting, and by turning immediately to the other man in the room.

"General Sint John." Ralph flashed that compelling smile.

"How good to see you, sir! When did you get into Fort Victoria?"

Mungo Sint John limped across the room to take Ralph's hand, and his single eye gleamed.

"Got in this very morning."

"Congratulations on your appointment, sir. We need a good soldier up here, the way things are going." Ralph's compliment was an oblique jibe at Doctor Jameson's own military aspirations. Rhodes had very recently appointed Mungo Sint John as the Company's Chief of Staff. He would be under Jameson's administration, naturally, but would be directly responsible for police and military affairs in the Charterlands of Rhodesia.

"Did your men find the break in the wires?" Jameson interrupted them.

"Bangles, and bracelets," Ralph nodded. "That's what happened to the wires. I have given the local chief a lesson that I hope-will teach him to behave himself. I fined him fifty head of cattle."

Jameson frowned quickly.

"Lobengula considers Matanka to be his vassal. He owns those cattle, the Mashona merely tend the herds on the king's behalf."

Ralph shrugged. "Then Matanka will have some explaining to do, and rather him than me, and that's the truth., "Lobengula won't let this pass -" Jameson broke off, and the frown cleared. He began to pace up and down behind his desk with excited, hopping, bird-like steps.

"Perhaps," he twitched at his scraggly little moustache, perhaps this is what we have been waiting for. Lobengula will not let it pass, nor, by God, will we." He paused and looked at Ralph. "How soon will you have the wires restored?"

"By noon tomorrow," Ralph told him promptly.

"Good! Good! We must get a message through to your father at Gubulawayo. If he protests to Lobengula that his vassals are stealing Company property, and informs him that we have fined him in cattle, what will Lobengula do?"

"He will send an impi to punish Matanka."

"Punish him"

"Cut his head off, kill his men, rape his women and burn his village."

"Exactly." Jameson punched his fist into his palm. "And Matanka is on Company ground and under protection of the British flag. It will be our duty, our bounden duty, to drive off Lobengula's men."