The Covenant (145 page)

“That will change, too. The day will come when your daughter here is married by a predikant reading the service from an Afrikaans Bible.”

“You think so soon?” Mrs. van Doorn asked. “I’m afraid you’ll be an old maid, Clara, if you wait for that.” Clara did not blush, but Detleef did.

After one agitated flight of speech, Dr. Pretorius looked about the room as though to command close attention, then said in a softer voice, “I want to speed the acceptance of our true language because it can become the chief agency in uniting the Afrikaners of this land and inspiring them to wrest the government from the English.”

“We have the numbers already,” Coenraad pointed out.

“But without a central soul, numbers are nothing. And what is the soul of a people? Its language. With Afrikaans we can capture this nation.”

At a subsequent meeting, at which he especially wanted Detleef to be present, Pretorius faced up to the accusation, launched by Coenraad, that Afrikaans was a second-class peasant language: “Exactly,
and that’s why its vitality is assured. It will be precisely like English. And why is that language so effective?”

Each listener offered some reason: “No declension of nouns.” “Few subjunctive verbs.” “Strict word order, which assures meaning.” “A lot of quick short words to indicate case.” “A simplified spelling.”

Clara said, “And if English spots a good word in another language, it takes it … with no apologies.”

At each idea, Dr. Pretorius nodded approvingly, then asked permission to read from the work of a distinguished Danish scholar who was exploring this subject: “He is Dr. Otto Jespersen, world-famous authority, and he says, ‘The English language is signalized by order and consistency … Simplification is the rule.’ And here he makes a point which relates specifically to our new Afrikaans: ‘Whenever I think of English and compare it with other languages, it seems to me positively and expressly
masculine
. It is the language of a grown-up man and has very little childish or feminine about it.’ ”

He asked Clara to pass out slips of paper, and when they all had pencils he directed them to write this sentence in English:
We ourselves often took our dogs with us
. “Four pronouns to express the first person plural. Now see what happens when we write the same sentence in Afrikaans:
Ons onsself het dikwelf ons honde saam met ons geneem
. One word—
ons
—to convey all those meanings.”

“But isn’t the English more precise?”

“It is indeed. Just as the Latin forms
agricola
, by the farmer,
agricolae
, to the farmer, are more precise than
the farmer
. But we refuse to bother with such niceties. Prepositions are so much simpler. One word for
farmer
. Sixty prepositions to define relationships.”

From another pocket he produced a handful of sheets on which verses from Matthew, Chapter 6, had been printed in English:

He pointed out how relatively simple this was, and how direct. He then asked the Van Doorns to study other sheets of paper, where the same verses appeared in the Old Dutch of their 1630 Amsterdam Bible.

He read this aloud twice, stressing the beauty of the flowing Dutch they had learned as children and still used when reciting their prayers. He obviously cherished the rhythms of this version, but indicated that it would be better when translated into Afrikaans, of which he gave a sample:

“Ah!” he cried triumphantly. “How excellent!” And he went over the new translation, line by line, indicating its superiority: “See how much simpler the Afrikaans is, how purified of old encrustations. This is to be the language of the future, believe me.”

When the two older Van Doorns protested that they did not want their Bible tampered with, he said bluntly, “The generation that is forty years old when the change comes will know an agony of the soul. After that we will be a new people.” When Coenraad tried to voice another doubt, he said abruptly, “Remember, if John Calvin were alive today, he would be using a Bible in Afrikaans.”

Detleef, back in his room, balanced the two versions of a word he loved: The old
Nachtmaal
becomes the new
Nagmaal
. I don’t like it. The mystery of
night
is lost. And for the first time he sensed that many great good things of ancient virtue might be lost during a normal lifetime: the women he had loved so much in the concentration camp, the sturdy virtues of General de Groot. He stared at the night and could not sleep, but as dawn broke he thought: It’s my duty to save the good old things.

•  •  •

While Detleef was enjoying these varied experiences, the young men of the Saltwood families were pursuing their studies in a much grimmer classroom. Near the city of Amiens and east of the great battle site of St. Quentin was a hunting preserve known as d’Ellville Wood, and both the Allies and the Germans realized that this grove of trees would prove crucial in the tremendous Battle of the Somme.

The German high command issued the order, “D’Ellville shall be taken, regardless of cost,” at exactly the time when the Allied command said, “The wood must be held at any cost.” A titanic battle to the death had become inescapable.

On 14 July 1916 Colonel Frank Saltwood, fifty-six years old and one of the first volunteers in his country’s expeditionary force, received orders to take and hold d’Ellville Wood. In his command were four of his nephews—Hilary and Roger of the Cape Town Saltwoods, Max and Timothy of De Kraal—and they, too, had volunteered early.

Throughout four unbroken days the two armies battled, calling upon every great gun in the area until the trenches shuddered from explosives. Without any rest or hot food, the five Saltwoods defended their terrain heroically, with Colonel Frank moving from spot to spot to encourage his nephews.

On the second day Hilary was shot through the head. On the third day young Max led a valiant charge, which was annihilated. And on the last day Colonel Frank, rushing to an endangered point, was struck full in the face by seven German bullets, and with his death the South African position was doomed.

But into his place leaped Roger, who at twenty years old assumed command of the battle. He would have led his men to defeat had not Timothy gone totally berserk, as heroic young men sometimes will, and held off a platoon of Germans, killing most of them. And now the two cousins, surrounded by innumerable dead, including three Saltwoods, rallied the South Africans. Ignoring the hailstorm of German shells, grimly preparing for the next attack, they staffed the command post and defended the woods which they had occupied at such fearful cost and held so tenaciously.

When the South Africans were finally relieved on the fifth day of battle Roger Saltwood, as senior in command, reported: “We took 3,150 men into the wood five days ago. We are marching 143 out.”

Delville Wood, as the battle became known in English, represented
perhaps the high spot in human courage during this war. The South African volunteers had given new meaning to the word
heroism
, but the cost could not even be calculated by critics who were not there. In the pompous tradition of the time, British headquarters issued a statement that was supposed to compensate for the terrible losses, as if this had been a kind of rugby game: “In the capture of Delville Wood the gallantry, the perseverance and determination of the South African Brigade deserve the highest commendation.”

This suicidal action had been devised and ordered by Sir Douglas Haig, one of the young generals who had learned their trade with Redvers Buller during the Boer War. Unfortunately, few of them had acquired his concern for the fighting man.

The two surviving Saltwoods, Roger of Cape Town and Timothy the V.C. from De Kraal, managed leaves together. They spent them at Sentinels with their Salisbury cousins, and as they sat beside the River Avon and looked across at the timeless cathedral, it was Timothy who told the local Saltwoods, “We did lose three of us, yes. But it was only what we should have done for England.”

At Stellenbosch, as the war in Europe stumbled to an end, there was considerable commotion. One of the university’s most promising recent graduates was announced as offering a series of four lectures on the moral bases upon which any government of the country must rest. Detleef was especially interested in the event because the speaker was Reverend Barend Brongersma, his own predikant. He invited Clara to hear the lectures with him, and her parents asked to come along, as did one of her brothers.

At Brongersma’s request, the assemblies were held not at the university but in the largest of the local churches, and all seats were taken. Brongersma was now thirty-seven, at the threshold of his powers and the apex of his appearance. He was tall, slim, with a head of dark hair, and he appeared modern in every way as opposed to the older Dutch and Scottish theologians who normally occupied podiums at the university. He was different from them, too, in that he did not address himself to abstruse philosophical problems, but to the down-to-earth difficulties a politician met in running a proper government. His voice was equal to the task; Dutch Reformed congregations appreciated a predikant who could storm and thunder, and he could.

He was certainly not a coward. At the opening of his first lecture he said that the future of this nation depended upon the way it managed its relationships with the various racial groups, and so that his listeners would know what he was talking about, he invited them to write down the figures he was about to recite: “They deal with the actual and projected populations of this country.” And he gave these data:

Without comment on the relative strengths of the five groups, he launched into a review of the positions the Dutch Reformed Church had taken on the matter of race during the past two and a half centuries, reminding his listeners of things they might have forgotten:

He said much more, of course, in this historical lecture, but he left the impression that the Christian church was one and undivided, that the Coloured and Bantu preferred to have their own church off to one side, and that the present division of the church into its various components was something ordained by God, approved by Jesus, and eminently workable in a plural society. He certainly did not apologize, and would have been astounded had anyone asked him to do so.