The Covenant (132 page)

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 assortment 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 God, 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 Blauuwkrantz, 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 God, 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 space 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 noble 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.

“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 men-folk.
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 assignments 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 Lourenço Marques train, disembarked his horses at Waterval-Boven, and rode slowly south toward the lake—a 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 farm—with 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 rondavels 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 brassbound 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 snatch 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 God, 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 butt 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 reassemble 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.