The Massarenes

by Ouida

The Colonial Office was applied to for information, and the Minister for the Colonies buttonholed in the Lobby. The Minister was chill and careful; he remarked that Lord Brancepeth was acting as an amateur, on his own responsibility—entirely on his own responsibility; he could not approve his action; the Loomalis were in insurrection; the Boers were the allies of England; there were treaties; treaties must be respected, however individuals might suffer; the Government could not be responsible for any adventurous gentleman fighting on his own hand.

A similar answer was returned to Lord Inversay when he, a weary and infirm old man, came up to town, and went to the Colonial Office and to the Premier.

A little later, fuller particulars were telegraphed from the newspaper correspondents at Capetown, and then everybody began again to talk of Harry at the dinner-tables, and club-houses, and pleasure places in which he had been once such a familiar figure.

The Boers had, as usual, made an excuse of an imaginary transgression of boundary, to attack a friendly tribe, of which they were bound to respect the neutrality. They had harried and ravaged the country, carried off herds and flocks, burned villages, and borne off to servitude old men, women and children, with all those excesses of barbarous brutality which invariably characterize the introduction of civilization anywhere. This especial tribe was blameless, willing to be at peace, and contented to live in a simple and natural manner with the harvests of a bountiful soil. But that soil their neighbors wanted; it is the story of every war.

Brancepeth had gone as a traveler, only to look on; but he was soon disgusted by the cruelty of the white men, touched by the helplessness of the natives, alienated by the avarice and violence of the former, and moved by the rights and sufferings of the latter. He had gone with no intention of taking a share in the strife; but when he saw the flaming kraals, the ravaged flocks, the fettered women, the starved and hunted old people and young children, the blood of a soldier grew hot in him; the sense of justice uprose in him; the generosity of a manly temper impelled him to take part with the weak, the oppressed, the natural owners of the vast plains, the solemn mountains, the trackless hills, the immense waters. He drew his sword on their side. He led them more than once to victory. If he had had a single troop of the men he had commanded at home, he would have driven the Dutchmen back over their own veldt, and forced them to relinquish their prey. But the poor Loomalis had been already exhausted, demoralized, hopelessly weakened, when he had first come into their land. They could not second his efforts or comprehend his tactics. Had he arrived a month earlier, he might perhaps have saved them. As it was, he could only die with them.

He had fought side by side with their chief, Mahembele, hewing down the Boers with a sabre when the last shots had been fired from his revolver, and not a single cartridge had been left.

“It is not your cause; go, while you have life,” said the African to him.

“I’ll be damned if I will,” said Brancepeth. “Right is right, and the right is on your side.”

So he fought like a knight of old, knee-deep in the heap of dead he had slain, and he fell at last as the sun went down, pierced by a score of wounds, and Mahembele dropped, shot through the forehead, across his body.

The Boers retreated down the hillside—for he had mauled them terribly—and a few of the Loomalis ventured to carry off the body of their chief for burial; and as they removed it, they saw that the white leader was not dead quite, and in gratitude they bore him away to a cavern in the rocks, where their women tended him, until months afterwards some English travelers, hearing of his deeds and of his fate, sought him out, and had him carried down the river to their camp, many miles away. Thus it became known who he was, and how he had given away his life for these poor and persecuted people.