The Covenant Part 66

When Kitchener found to his grim dismay that the Boers did not intend to surrender, as a defeated rabble should, he became distraught and issued orders that the farms of dissident commando members be burned to the ground, their fields ravaged and their livestock driven away: 'They may fight, but they won't feed.'

Before he left South Africa, Lord Roberts had applied this scorched-earth policy selectively, putting to the torch only those farms known to be collaborating with the commandos, but by the time Major Frank Saltwood was transferred from Buller's defunct command to Kitchener's, the practice had spread. 'I really don't think it will have much bearing upon the burghers,' Saltwood warned when he studied the figures, but Kitchener was adamant, and for the first time Saltwood saw the steel in this man's fiber. Clean-shaven except for a distinctive mustache, trim, rigid, accepting no nonsense from anyone, he seemed the right man for the unpleasant task of cleaning up the few recalcitrant rebels like old Paulus de Groot.

'Shall we burn his farm?' an English aide asked, and before Kitchener could reply, Saltwood volunteered: 'That would be a mistake, sir. Already the man's a hero. Simply create more sympathy.' When these prudent words were spoken, Lord Kitchener stared at his South African liaison, trying to a.s.sess him: Is this man to be trusted to put England's interest first, or is he infected with local patriotism? This time, however, what he says makes sense.

'Do not burn the De Groot farm,' Kitchener ordered, and for the moment it was spared, but when the wily old man continued to strike at unforeseen places, making fools of the English, Kitchener became coldly furious, and although he did not yet burn De Groot's farm, he ordered a wide swath of desolation on either side of the railway leading to Lourenco Marques. As soon as this was done, the Venloo Commando swept in and cut the railway in four places, to the intense delight of the French correspondent who accompanied the raid.

This was important, because the press of the world, especially the cartoonists, turned savagely against Great Britain, lampooning both her and Kitchener as murderers and bullies. Hardly a day pa.s.sed that the influential papers in Amsterdam, Berlin and New York did not crucify Kitchener, showing him as a tyrant burning the food needed for starving Boer women and children. When one of the n.o.ble lord's English aides saw a selection of the worst cartoons, he grumbled, 'd.a.m.ned few of those great fat Dutch women are starving.' But the corrosive propaganda continued, until it appeared that the entire world was opposed to England's performance in South Africa, as indeed it was, save for countries like Canada, Australia and New Zealand, which retained legal ties to the mother country.

The hero in this ceaseless barrage of pro-Boer propaganda had to be General de GrootVengeur du Veld and a cartoonist's delight. He was an old man in a frock coat and top hat, and he was accompanied by a woman whose stately demeanor under all circ.u.mstances had won the admiration of all newsmen. Together they formed an irresistible pair, especially when an American photographer caught them holding hands beside their battered wagon. In London a brazen c.o.c.kney paperboy bought himself a stack of white envelopes, labeled them and a cartoonist's delight. He was an old man in a frock coat and top hat, and he was accompanied by a woman whose stately demeanor under all circ.u.mstances had won the admiration of all newsmen. Together they formed an irresistible pair, especially when an American photographer caught them holding hands beside their battered wagon. In London a brazen c.o.c.kney paperboy bought himself a stack of white envelopes, labeled them portrait of general de groot portrait of general de groot and sold them for sixpence. When the purchaser opened the envelope to find nothing, the cheeky lad cried, to the delight of those in on the joke, 'd.a.m.n me, Guv'nor, 'e got away again!' and sold them for sixpence. When the purchaser opened the envelope to find nothing, the cheeky lad cried, to the delight of those in on the joke, 'd.a.m.n me, Guv'nor, 'e got away again!'

Who was chasing De Groot in these eight frustrating months of 1901? Instead of the troops going home at Christmas, 1900, as Lord Roberts had said they would, some two hundred thousand had to stay on. To them, at one time or another, were added another two hundred forty-eight thousand, not all of whom were in the field at one time. De Groot had two hundred twenty men, but of course there were other equally insolent commandos operating; however, the disparity between forces was both enormous and enraging. The vast numbers of English troops ought to have been able to catch the commandos, but they didn't; old De Groot and his wife ambled their way right through the traps set to catch them.

At one point when the summer heat was most unkind to the imported troops unaccustomed to the highveld, the following units, among many others, were striving to catch the Venloo Commando: from England, the Coldstream Guards; from Scotland, the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders; from Ireland, the heroic Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers; from Wales, the Royal Welsh Fusiliers; from Canada, Lord Strathcona's Horse; from Australia, the Imperial Bushmen; from New Zealand, the Rough Riders; from Tasmania, the Mobile Artillery; from India, Lumsden's Horse; from Ceylon, the Mounted Infantry; from Burma, the Mounted Rifles; from Gibraltar, the 1st Manchesters; from Mauritius, the King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry; from Egypt, the 1st Royal Fusiliers; and from Crete, the 2nd Rifle Brigade.

Earlier in the war the Boers, too, had help from outside. Adventurers from all nations, believing themselves to be fighting for liberty against aggression, had flocked to South Africa, and one important French colonel died in their ranks. There was an Irish regiment always eager to take a thrust at the English; a German and a Hollander contingent. Most tragic was a volunteer unit composed of one hundred and twenty-one idealistic Scandinavians, mostly Norwegian; in one of the earliest battles of the war almost the entire force was exterminated.

Such events were brilliantly reported, especially in the English press, for in addition to Winston Churchill, Rudyard Kipling came out to write about the conflict, championing the English cause in prose and verse; Edgar Wallace was a frenetic legman; Conan Doyle was afire with patriotism; H. W. Nevinson showed patrician restraint, and Richard Harding Davis the opposite; Banjo Patterson, who would become Australia's Poet Laureate with 'Waltzing Matilda,' did excellent reporting; and in the closing days quiet John Buchan looked things over. A strange a.s.sortment of visitors filtered in as observers; Prince Kuhio, heir to the throne of Hawaii, appeared one day, and as the scion of a family always strongly pro-English, was invited to the front, where he pulled the lanyard of a big gun, firing his blast at the hidden Boers.

In August 1901 English pressure became so powerful that the Boer command decreed that wives must no longer ride with their husbands, and on a bleak hillside Paulus de Groot had to inform his companion since childhood that she must leave. She did not want to go; that mean farm at Vrymeer was much less attractive to her than riding with her husband into battle. She had no fear of war's rigors; she wanted to share all things with Paulus, even though she suspected that sudden death or slow disillusion must be their fate. When Paulus remained firm, she became disconsolate.

'You are my life,' she said.

'It's the others. They made the decision. You must go home.'

'Where you are is home.'

'The rides will grow more difficult. The lines tighter.'

Thinking that this might be the last time she would ever see him, she knew that she must not cry. Instead she broke into an infectious chuckle. 'Remember when we were married? After the last battle with the Zulu? And the dominee said in a loud voice, "Does any man know why this man and woman should not be wed?" '

'Good G.o.d, what a moment!' the general cried, and then he, too, laughed.

'And Balthazar Bronk, always a troublemaker for other people, shouted that the marriage was forbidden. That we had been raised as brother and sister.'

They stood silent on the dark veld, and then she took his hand and whispered, 'You were never my brother, Paulus. After that night at Blauuw-krantz, I loved you always. And I always will.'

De Groot tried to speak, but no words came.

'Get sleep when you can,' she said, and they walked to the old wagon. He kissed her and helped her up, and she started up the hill.

Paulus remained holding his hat as she climbed to the crest. He did not expect her to look back, nor did she, but when she was gone, he prayed: Almighty G.o.d, forget the battles for a while and look after that woman.

When De Groot saw the first one, he shuddered. It was Lord Kitchener's invention for ending the guerrilla war. It was perched beside a vulnerable stretch of railway track, a device of admirable simplicity. It was made of corrugated iron and looked like one of those circular Spanish barns called silos, except that it was squatter. It consisted of two iron cylinders, one fitted inside the other, with enough room inside to house armed patrolmen. In the narrow s.p.a.ce between the two cylinders rocks and debris had been jammed to give both protection and insulation. The top was enclosed by a conical roof, so that from a distance the contraption resembled a heavy, blunt cigar jammed into the earth.

Since the new device was obviously lethal and intended to halt the depredations of commandos, De Groot wanted to know as much about them as possible, and a man from the Carolina Commando, who had seen one after it had been blown up by a large force of dynamite, told all the burghers, 'Very difficult to destroy. Manned by seven soldiers. Three little beds. Place to cook. And some have telephones to the next blockhouse.'

As the commando looked down the tracks they had expected to dynamite, they saw six more of the blockhouses, cheap to build, easy to erect, and effective in breaking the open veld into manageable units out of which a mounted commando would have difficulty in moving.

'Look!' Jakob cried, and at the far end of the line of blockhouses, soldiers were stringing barbed wire from one house to the next. 'Kitchener's building a fence across Africa.'

This was correct. Goaded by ridicule, the commander had given orders that the railway system be protected by these new-style blockhouses, and when the first hundred proved successful, he called for eight thousand more, some of them built of stone. Once a commando found itself driven against one of the fortified barriers, its retreat could be so cut off that capture seemed inevitable.

Not for Paulus de Groot. When he was trapped the first time, in southern Transvaal, there was no escape; barbed wire flourished everywhere, but the English troops still had to find him. At the darkest moment he told Van Doorn, 'No army in the world ever found a way to keep all its enlisted men awake. Somewhere there's a blockhouse sound asleep.' He sent Micah to test the line for a weak spot, but when the Zulu scout crawled back he reported: 'All manned. All awake.'

'Try again,' De Groot growled, and this time the scout isolated one iron fort in which all seven men seemed to be asleep. With a swiftness that amazed some of the commandos, De Groot, Van Doorn and Nxumalo crept up to the house, worked their way under the barbed wire, and rushed the loopholes four feet above the ground, pouring in a deadly fire, killing all the occupants. Within minutes the Venloo Commando were cutting the wires that had restrained them, and after they had regained the open veld, one newspaperman quoted De Groot: 'Lord Blockhead's little toy houses cause us no worry.'

When cartoons across the world showed the n.o.ble lord playing with blocks while old General de Groot slipped away behind him, an enraged headquarters in Pretoria commanded: 'That man must be brought in.'

Regiments from eleven nations applied pressure, and once again the old man was trapped within a barbed-wire hedge, with Canadians, Irishmen, Australians and Welshmen closing in. This time he adopted a simple device: rounding up all available cattle from unburned farms, he stampeded them toward a spot between two blockhouses, and as the frightened animals piled up against the barbed wire, they simply carried it away, while the Venloo Commando swept off to freedom yet again.

This time the cartoonists were merciless: 'like ulysses . . .' And they showed De Groot and his men tied to the bellies of the steers as they galloped past a sleeping Polyphemus who looked exactly like Lord Kitchener. . . .' And they showed De Groot and his men tied to the bellies of the steers as they galloped past a sleeping Polyphemus who looked exactly like Lord Kitchener.

'All of them!' he thundered. 'I want all of them thrown into camps.' So his men moved out to corral every woman and child belonging to the fighting Boers. They would be herded into camps of concentration, to keep them from feeding and supporting their menfolk. It was pointed out to Kitchener that there were already more than fifty thousand refugees in camps, many there at the behest of Boers themselves, for they had been unable to survive on farms without their men. 'I don't care if there are fifty thousand more!' stormed Kitchener.

When the drive against the commando-homesteads was well under way, and the Boer territories further denuded of women and farms and cattle, leaving only smoking ruins, Kitchener began to see good results. Three commandants, unable to survive against starvation and barbed wire, voluntarily surrendered, but before doing so their top men crept away to join up with General de Groot, whose forces now reached their maximum: four hundred and thirty hardened men, a hundred extra ponies and fifty blacks. This would be the final army, led by an old man approaching seventy.

Pleased with the apparent effectiveness of the concentration camp, Lord Kitchener summoned Major Saltwood one morning and gave him an order: 'Burn Vrymeer and herd the women into the camp at Chrissie Meer.'

'Are you sure you want to do this, sir?'

'I am,' the steely-eyed general said, 'and I deem it best if you lead the men, rather than an Englishman.'

'I think of myself as an Englishman, sir, and I don't relish a.s.signments like this.'

'I consider you a local, Saltwood. It'll look better.'

So with a mixed detachment of seventy, including troops from various colonies, Saltwood rode east on the Lourenco Marques train, disembarked his horses at Waterval-Boven, and rode slowly south toward the lakea journey he had taken in happier times. When he reached Venloo and saw the heavy price it had paid in this war, all windows shattered, a feeling of despair came over him, and he remembered what Maud had said that day at Trianon: 'Seems more like Genghis Khan.'

Then he turned west on the pleasant rural road leading to the lake, and when he crested the hill he could see the two farms at which he had once been so happy and so well received. It pained him to think that these good people had later considered him to be a spy, but he supposed, upon reflection, that he had been, in a general way of speaking. He did not want to go on, but when the men behind began to rein up near him he sighed and headed for the rickety buildings of the De Groot farm. 'Not much lost if they burn,' a Welshman said.

Sybilla was in the kitchen, and when she saw the troops she knew what to expect. Without saying a word, she packed a few belongings, reached for her sunbonnet, and appeared on the stoep. 'General Kitchener's orders,' a soldier said. 'Men, set the fires.'

In a way the flames were merciful; they were erasing farm buildings that had long since served their day, and removing them was an act of good husbandry, but as the fire spread, Saltwood became aware of voices behind him, and turning, saw the four Van Doorn children: the girls Anna, Sannah and Johanna, and the handsome little boy Detlev.

'Sir, sir! What are you doing?' one of the girls screamed.

At this moment Major Saltwood chanced to look down from his horse and catch the eye of the oldest girl, Johanna, twenty-one years old, and he saw in her such hatred that he almost shuddered, yet with this fierce animosity she was also studying him, as if she had seen him before. She did not seem to remember, for which he was grateful.

'I suppose you'll burn ours, too,' she said through teeth that were almost clenched. 'My father rides with the general.'

'Be gentle with the old woman,' Saltwood shouted at his men as Sybilla was placed in a wagon. 'Gather the children.' The three youngest were lifted up by soldiers and deposited beside her as the troop wheeled its horses and made its way to the Van Doorn farmwith Johanna walking grimly through the dust.

This was no outmoded collection of shacks. It was one of the stoutest farms in eastern Transvaal, a place of stone buildings and excellent ronda-vels for its blacks. To burn this would be to destroy the heart of a rich agricultural district. 'Burn it!' Saltwood said, but before the torch could be applied to the wooden parts that would ignite, a woman appeared at the kitchen door.

'What are you doing?' she demanded.

'Lord Kitchener's orders, ma'am. You're to get in the wagon.'

'That I will not do,' Sara van Doorn said, and when the Australians guarding the wagon relaxed their attention Johanna ran to join her mother. Together the two women blocked the entrance to the house.

'Remove them!' Saltwood commanded, and a detachment of Irish cavalrymen grabbed at the women, but they broke away and dashed into the house. When soldiers forced them out, the women carried in their arms the chief treasures of the Van Doorn family: Mevrou van Doorn held the bra.s.sbound Bible; Johanna, the ceramic pot in which her father made his bread pudding.

A good fire was now burning in the shed, and one of the soldiers tried to s.n.a.t.c.h the book, intending to throw it in, but Mevrou van Doorn struggled to retain possession, and there was a scuffle until Saltwood saw what was happening. 'Good G.o.d, man. That's a Bible. Stand off.' He was too late, however, to protect the pot that Johanna held, for a brutish soldier brought the b.u.t.t of his gun around in a circle, caught the pot, and smashed it. When the dozen pieces tumbled to the boards of the stoep, it was apparent that a clever person with the right glue could rea.s.semble the precious old thing, and Johanna stooped to gather some of the pieces, but this enraged the soldier, who brushed her aside and ground the remaining fragments under his boot.

'Stand back, you fool!' Saltwood cried, but as he did so he looked into the eyes of this embittered girl, and she remembered who he was: 'Mother! He's the spy.'

From her wagon, Sybilla looked out to inspect the man in charge of this destruction, and she, too, recognized him: 'The spy!' The twin girls, peering from beneath the canvas, saw who he was and they joined the lamentation: 'The spy! He's Saltwood the spy.'

When Frank dismounted to rea.s.sure the two Van Doorn women on the stoep, Johanna spat in his face: 'They should have hanged you.'

'They should have hanged you!' the twins shouted, and Detlev, finding sticks in the wagon, started throwing them at their betrayer. Meanwhile, the fires raged.

It was only thirty-eight miles from Vrymeer to the cl.u.s.ter of large lakes which the English called Chrissie Meer. Here the concentration camp had been established, but in that distance Major Saltwood's column had collected five additional wagons filled with women and children from farms en route. Since all buildings had been burned, the women were sooty and weeping as they turned the last corner; then they looked with awe at their destination. Their camp lay at the edge of one of the loveliest lakes in Africa: a surface shimmering in sunlight, hills rising softly from the sh.o.r.e, flowers in beds, and a hint of animals hiding in the glens. Saltwood said to a member of the Welsh Fusiliers, 'If you must have a prison camp . . . the clean air . . . the sunlight. . .' In months ahead when the name of this camp echoed with shame, he would concede that it was at least a place of physical beauty. To it he delivered Sybilla de Groot, Sara van Doorn and the four Van Doorn children, but as he did so he noticed by sheerest accident a tent in which three young children lay sleeping, he thought; on closer inspection he saw that they were awake, too emaciated to respond when he spoke to them.

Rushing to the commandant's office, a doctor from the English Midlands, he cried, 'Sir, those children in the tent at the bottom of Row Eighteen. Sir, those children are starving.'

'There is no starvation here,' the doctor said sternly, as if reporting on his hospital to a village committee of inspection.

'But those children! Legs like matchsticks!'

'We are all like matchsticks,' the doctor cried, his voice suddenly rising almost to a scream, as if his earlier composure had been tenuous. 'And do you know why?' He uttered a string of obscenities Saltwood had not heard for years; they were not used at officers' headquarters. 'It's your G.o.dd.a.m.ned Lord Kitchener, that's who it is. Go back and tell him what you saw.'

'I can't leave my women here . . .'

'You're right, Colonel . . . What's your name?'

'Saltwood, and I'm a major.'

'English?'

'I'm from the Cape. And I'd appreciate your telling me where to take these women.'

'Where? Yes, where?'

'Doctor, lower your voice. You sound demented.'

'I am demented!' the little man screamed in a Lancashire dialect. 'I am demented with shame.'

With a sudden swipe of his right arm, Saltwood knocked the agitated man against a wall, then pulled him up and sat him at his desk. 'Now tell me without bellowingwhat's the matter?'

'Typhoid's the matter. Measles are the matter. And dysentery, dysentery's the matter.' He broke down and sobbed so pitifully that Saltwood had to cover his own face in compa.s.sion.

'Tell me in an orderly way,' he said, touching the doctor's shoulder. 'I can see it's horrible, but what can we do?'

The doctor jabbed at his eyes, rumpled through some papers, found a report, and covered it with his hands for a moment. 'We're at the end of the supply line here, Colonel. Headquarters can't send us enough food. But the diet would sustain life, except for the incessant illness.' And here he repeated his litany of death: 'Typhoid, measles, dysentery. We could fight any one, but a body already weakened by stringent diet, it hasn't the strength. These figures tell our story.' And he shoved the paper forward. 'Deaths per thousand, months of February, March, seven hundred and eighty-three.'

'My G.o.d!' Saltwood cried.

'Those were the bad months. Chrissie Meer's average is usually less than three hundred.'

'But even so, that's one in three.'

'Yes,' the doctor said. 'Of the thirty-seven women and children you delivered today, maybe fifteen, maybe twenty will be dead at the end of six months, if dysentery runs wild again, if the food supply weakens.'

'Doctor, you are in very sore condition yourself. I think I should take you back to Pretoria.'

A nurse heard this proposal and stepped forward, an extremely gaunt woman. 'Dr. Higgins controls his feelings most of the time. We all try to. And when we get fresh vegetables or meat from the countryside, we keep many people alive. But without medicines .. .' She shrugged her shoulders. 'Dr. Higgins is a very strong man, spiritually. He does what he can.'

'What do you need?' Saltwood asked.

She hesitated, looked at Dr. Higgins, and saw that she would get no help there. He had withdrawn from the discussion. 'We need everything. Hospital beds. Medicines. We have no toilet paper. Dysentery runs wild, and children seem to starve, as you saw. If we don't get help soon, and I mean nourishing food in better supply, all the children you brought us will be dead.'

Two nights later, when he was back in Pretoria, he found that there were no additional supplies for Chrissie Meer, at the far end of the line: no extra food, no medicines, no sanitary aids, and he could see his children, the ones he had taken to the camp, dying. Retiring to his room, with dull anguish a.s.sailing him, he wrote a love letter: My dearest darling Maud, I have never before addressed a letter to you like this, because I did not appreciate how desperately I love you and how much I need you. I have been to Chrissie Meer, to the big concentration camp there, and I am shattered. You must do all you can to alleviate the condition of these pitiful people. Food, blankets, medicines, trained people. Maud, spend all our savings, volunteer yourself, but for G.o.d's sake and the reputation of our people, you must do something. At this end I shall do whatever I can. An evil fog has fallen over this land, and if we do not dissipate it promptly, it will contaminate all future relationships between Englishman and Boer.

When I rode back from Chrissie Meer, I reflected on the fact that the three men who were spoilers of this land, Shaka, Rhodes, Kitchener, not one of them had a wife. I fear that men without women are capable of terrible misdeeds, and I want to apologize to you for having allowed Mr. Rhodes to delay our marriage as he did. I was as evil as he in conforming to that hateful posture, and I bless you tonight for the humanity you have brought into my life.

Your most loving husband, Frank When word circulated at headquarters that Maud Saltwood was creating disturbances'Not riots, you understand, but real annoyances, questions, and all that, you know'Lord Kitchener was enraged. It infuriated him that one of his own men should be unable to control his wife, permitting her to make a fuss over the camps, where, as he pointed out again and again, 'the women and children are much better off than they would be in their own homes.'

'Bring Saltwood in here!' he thundered. When the major stood before him he used his baton to indicate a pile of papers. 'What's all thisthese reportsabout your wife, Saltwood?'

'She's doing what she can to alleviate conditions'

'Alleviate? There's nothing to alleviate.'

'Sir, with all respect, have you seen the death rate'

'd.a.m.nit, sir, don't you be insolent with me.' The n.o.ble lord looked as if he could bite Saltwood in half, and would relish doing so. 'You sit down there, and listen to someone who knows.'

He summoned a Dr. Riddle, from London, who had just returned from a tour of the forty-odd camps. He was a cheery man, obviously well-fed, and seemed full of enthusiasm. With alacrity he took the report Lord Kitchener held out to him. 'I wrote this, you understand, Saltwood. Done on the spot.' From it he read his major conclusions: 'The Boer women and children are noticeably better off than they would be if left on their abandoned farms. They receive adequate supplies of the most healthful foods, on which they seem to prosper and if'

'Did you get out to Chrissie Meer?' Saltwood interrupted. 'Listen to the report,' Kitchener snapped. 'I wasn't able to get that far east,' Dr. Riddle said.

'Whatever illness appears in the camps is due primarily to the Boer women themselves. Having been raised on farms without privies, they cannot learn to adopt the sanitary measures which alone prevent the spread of epidemics. And when illness does strike, they insist upon resorting to country measures that have not been used in civilized nations for the past sixty years. They wrap a measled child in the skin of a freshly slaughtered goat. They grub in the countryside for old herbs which they claim can reduce fever. They recite rhymes as if they were witch doctors. And they will not wash their hands.'

'I am seriously thinking of bringing criminal charges against some of these mothers,' Kitchener said with great irritation. 'They should be tried for murder. It's all their fault, you know.'

'So I must conclude that the English authorities are doing everything humanly possible to protect the women and children in our charge. I found them in good condition, reasonably happy, and with every probability of leaving the camps in better condition than when they entered.'

'What would your precious wife make of that?' Lord Kitchener asked, fastening his hard eyes on Saltwood.

Saltwood, having once denied his wife in the presence of a strong man, had no intention of doing so again: 'I think, sir, she would say that such a report does both you and the king an injustice.'

An explosion without specific words erupted, after which Kitchener roared, 'Are you impugning the integrity of Dr. Riddle?'

Taking a deep breath, Saltwood replied, 'I am saying that his report does not begin to cover conditions at Chrissie Meer, and, I suspect, at a lot of other installations I haven't seen.'

'But your wife has seen them?'