The Covenant by James A. Michener
‘Each of you, select two horses,’ he told the Englishman.
‘What are you going to do?’
‘Take two horses and anything you especially prize. Ride to Grahamstown.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘This was my farm. My family’s farm. And I’m going to burn it to the ground.’
‘That’s insanity.’
‘I’ll give you thirty minutes to pick the things you want. You women, gather your personal possessions.’ When the Englishman protested, he said quietly, ‘That’s more than your Lord Kitchener gave my wife.’
When the people were herded away, he set fire to everything, adding to the combustibles when the flames threatened to go out. When the farm was reduced to ashes, he rode to the next one and then the next. At last he told Van Doorn, ‘Over that hill, if I remember. I was only a child then, and maybe I don’t remember. But over that hill …’ When they reached the top there was nothing, and De Groot said, ‘I was afraid. But aren’t those tracks? It’ll be the next hill, maybe.’
At the top of the fourth hill Jakob van Doorn saw, for the first time in his life, the splendid farm put together by his ancestors: ‘I think Mal Adriaan must have started the place. The house was built by Lodevicus the Hammer. Those additions were Tjaart’s, God bless that fighting man. He’d understand.’
‘When this one goes up,’ De Groot said with soaring enthusiasm, ‘all the Cape Boers will rally to us. It’ll be a whole new war.’
‘All who intend to are already riding with our commandos,’ Jakob warned. ‘There’ll be no more.’
‘Of course there will. They’re patriotic …’
‘They have money, Paulus, not patriotism. I was here, remember?’
‘At this farm?’
‘No, but at the Cape. They talk politics, not war.’
As the commando came down the hill, the men began to shout, and from the farm buildings numerous people appeared. ‘Get ready to leave!’ the Venloo men cried as they began to light their torches, but before General de Groot could give the signal, a woman in a gray linsey-woolsey dress appeared at the door of the principal house.
‘What do you want?’ she asked as the men approached.
‘I am General de Groot, of the Venloo Commando, and we are going to burn your farm.’
‘I saw your wife at Chrissie Meer,’ the woman said quietly. ‘And aren’t you Van Doorn? I saw your son and daughter.’
There was a long silence as the two men looked at this fearless woman, and finally De Groot asked, ‘Are you the woman of the camps?’
‘I am Maud Turner Saltwood.’
Both of the Boers spoke at once: ‘The traitor?’
‘The man who quit Lord Kitchener because he could not tolerate the camps.’
‘You are that lady?’ De Groot asked again. When she nodded, he hesitated, then wheeled his horse about and led his men, still with their flaming brands, away from the farm. He rode farther south for two days, but during that time he began to realize the futility of attempting to reach the Indian Ocean; from three directions young Boer scouts reported the presence of enemy troops, and Micah Nxumalo, who had gone in the direction of Grahamstown, said that a force of English and Cape colonials were massing there. At dawn on the third day De Groot told his commando, ‘We could never get to Port Elizabeth. Let’s go home.’
They left behind them a flame of glory and wonder, the commando that almost reached the sea, the men from the tiny town of Venloo who rode through the heartland of the conqueror and then turned back, untouched by the four hundred thousand who searched for them.
When Maud Saltwood returned to Chrissie Meer to complete her documentation on the concentration camps, she wanted to examine, as dispassionately as possible, the actual conditions, and she sought out Sybilla de Groot, knowing her to be a sensible woman. But she found her so emaciated from dysentery that she wondered how she could stand, let alone converse intelligently.
‘Was Frank Saltwood a spy?’ the old woman asked.
‘We’ve never discussed it.’
‘We know that Lord Kitchener’s a monster.’
‘He’s not a monster. He’s a foolish, bullheaded man who has no heart. Now we must get you some medicine.’
‘There is none,’ the old woman said, and she was right. The English could bring into this tight area four hundred and forty-eight thousand soldiers, but they could not find space in their ships for the extra medicines and food needed to save emaciated women and children. They could import a hundred thousand horses for their cavalry, but not three cows for their concentration camps. Guns bigger than houses they could haul in, but no hospital equipment. It was insane; it was horrifying; and in her news reports Maud Saltwood said so.
‘That woman should be shot’ was Lord Kitchener’s sober evaluation of the affair. Many members of Parliament felt the same way, and her husband’s cousin, Sir Victor, kept a low profile, for she had besmirched his name. But on she went, one woman exposing to the world the monstrous wrong of these camps. In Cape Town many English families stopped speaking to her husband, while others commiserated with him over his wife’s misconduct, not realizing that he supported her enthusiastically. His income, which she spent lavishly, kept alive some three hundred women who would otherwise have perished, and for this he would be forever grateful to his vigorous wife.
While Kitchener raged, Maud quietly continued interrogating women at Chrissie Meer, spending much time in the associated camp where blacks were being held. There she talked with women of Micah Nxumalo’s family, and they were suffering as sorely as the whites.
‘Why we here?’ one woman asked plaintively, showing her thin arms.
‘Isn’t your father fighting with the Boers?’ Maud asked.
‘Your husband fight with English. They throw you in jail?’
Her most fruitful discussions were with Sybilla de Groot, for the old woman sensed that she would soon die and was eager to have her views spread before the world: ‘Like many wrong things, it was all wrong. There should have been no camps.’
‘Some say,’ Maud argued, ‘that the camps were good for you women. They gave you security.’
If Sybilla had been strong, she would have raged and stomped about the little bell tent; she was so weak she had to remain seated, but she did point to the entrance: ‘Through there we have carried eight dead. Detlev counts them for me. What kind of security is that?’
But when Maud asked about sanitary conditions, the old woman did make certain concessions: ‘We were farm families, far from towns. We didn’t have privies like they say we must. We didn’t have these new medicines. In the free veld we were never sick. In these tents, these dirty barracks, we die. Eight of us, and soon me.’ She rocked back and forth, tears streaming from her eyes. ‘That’s why I say it was wrong from the beginning. It was all wrong.’
‘Did you get enough to eat?’ Maud asked.
Sybilla held out her arms for inspection. ‘You don’t get enough. You grow weak. So you get sick. Then, no matter how much you eat, it does no good.’ She pointed to the field not far from her tent where women and children, driven mad by dysentery, were squatting and wrenching their insides. ‘It’s all wrong,’ she said.
Desperately Maud wanted to keep this great woman alive, as a symbol of the fact that English women, at least, would do everything in their power to save a Boer woman, even though she was the wife of their country’s principal aggravator. She failed.
In April 1902, when the imperial armies were at last closing in upon Paulus de Groot, pinning him against the barbed-wired fences but never catching him, Detlev woke early one morning to find his Tant Sybilla gasping. Since it was a clear autumn day, with the air somewhat fresher than usual, he knew the old woman was in distress, and he wanted to awaken Johanna, but his sister was deep in sleep, exhausted in the cool morning air, so he went to Sybilla’s cot alone.
‘Are you awake?’
‘I hoped you’d come.’ She turned her head
‘She’s still asleep.’
‘Let her rest.’
‘Are you all right, Tannie?’
‘I’m resting, too.’
‘Shall I sit with you?’
‘Oh, I would like that.’ She lay quietly, his hand in hers. Then she showed renewed vitality and clutched him tighter. ‘They say the war’s almost over, Detlev. For you it’s just beginning. Never forget these days. Never forget that it was the English who did these things. You must fight, fight.’
He wanted to say that he had no horse, but she continued: ‘Detlev, you may never see the general again. Remember, he did not surrender. Even when they came at him from all sides …’
She seemed to fall asleep, then awakened with a start. ‘Whether she’s sleeping or not, I must speak to Johanna.’ When he roused his sister, the old woman said brusquely, ‘Now you go out and play.’ He walked slowly from the tent, but there was no play. There were more than seventy young children in the camp that morning, but there was no play. They sat in the sun and breathed deeply, as if they had strength only for that.
On her deathbed Sybilla admonished Johanna: ‘If I die before noon, tell no one. That way you can get my ration for today. And, Johanna, it’s now up to you to see that Detlev survives. Women are stronger than men. You must keep him alive so he can carry on the fight. Even if you must starve yourself, keep him alive. Never surrender.’
This effort exhausted her, and she was near death, but suddenly her entire face became animated, not only her eyes. Clutching at Johanna, she gasped, ‘And if they bring “hands-uppers” into this camp, kill them. Find long needles and kill them. In this camp heroes lived, not “hands-uppers.” ’
She was dead. Johanna called Detlev because she knew her brother loved this old woman, and he understood when she pledged him to secrecy. They sat all morning on her bed, talking to her, and got her ration, and when the attendants finally came to take her away, Detlev did not cry; many children in this camp never cried. But toward evening, when Johanna was apportioning the stolen ration, something happened that he would never forget: years later, generations later, he would remember that instant. Johanna broke the food into two equal pieces, weighed them in her two frail hands, then took from one and added to the other, making it much bigger. ‘This is yours,’ she said, and she handed him the larger share.
When the remaining Boer generals met to consider what they must do in the face of the overwhelming pressure brought against them by Lord Kitchener, they realized that in order to have an orderly discussion they must somehow muzzle Paulus de Groot. They knew that he would bellow ‘No surrender,’ and they were willing to have him say this once, to clear his conscience, but they did not want him repeating it every ten minutes to the detriment of sensible evaluations.
‘We are not defeated,’ one of the younger men said. ‘The English have lost six thousand men killed. Sixteen thousand more dead in their hospitals. Twenty-three thousand more or less seriously wounded.’
‘What have our losses been?’ an older man asked.
‘Maybe five thousand killed, but they were our finest.’
‘How many children have died in the camps?’ the old man asked.
‘Twenty thousand.’ From the rear of the room a man sighed. It was Jakob van Doorn, there to support his general.
‘More than all the men on both sides, we have lost our children.’
‘There was nothing we could do about it,’ a young general said.
‘There’s something we can do about it now,’ another man said. ‘We can surrender.’
This was the word that De Groot was waiting for. Quietly he said, ‘We shall never surrender. We can carry this fight for another six years.’
‘We can indeed,’ one of the younger generals said. ‘But can our children?’ And the debate continued.
On a day in late April an event occurred at the Chrissie Meer camp which worsened, even more, English-Boer relations. As Detlev van Doorn was about to eat a spoonful of meal, his sister Johanna rushed into the tent and knocked the bowl away.
‘Don’t touch it!’ she screamed.
He was so ravenous that he automatically fell to the floor, grabbing for the mealies, but again she cried, ‘Don’t touch it!’ and although her own body was wasting away with hunger, she ground the food into the dust.
‘Johanna!’ he pleaded, bewildered by her action.
‘They’ve mixed ground glass in our food. Mrs. Pretorius ate some and died.’
There were sixteen good medical reasons why Mrs. Pretorius should have died that day, and the seventeenth was most forceful of all: typhoid. But the prisoners began to believe that she had died from eating powdered glass, and no amount of logical persuasion could convince them otherwise. Thus the hideous legend festered and spread.
The little doctor, whose voice so often rose to a scream in this charnel house, came out to the women to swear upon his sacred honor that the English would never do anything like that. He himself ate the pap. Would eat another dishful right now, taken from anywhere. ‘The English,’ he insisted, ‘do not put ground glass in people’s food.’
‘Kitchener would!’ a woman cried, and all his efforts were fruitless. As Johanna told her hungry brother that night, ‘Always remember, Detlev. When we were starving the English tried to kill us with ground glass in the mealies.’
At the final meeting of the generals it was agreed that Paulus de Groot be kept away. They had heard his speech on bitter-ending; they respected his heroism; but the time had come when further resistance was futile. The Boers were ready to surrender.
After the painful decision was reached, they sent the young lawyer Jan Christian Smuts to inform the old man. Smuts, having been a courageous commando leader himself and one of the youngest, carried good credentials, and when he appeared, De Groot could guess his mission: ‘It’s all over, Paulus. You can go home.’
‘I would like to fight once more, Jan Christian.’
‘So would we all. But the children …’
‘The children most of all would understand.’
‘You must go home.’
‘Let me have my Venloo men and we’ll go.’
‘No.’ Smuts laughed. ‘None of that, old man. We’ve sent the Venloo men on ahead. We couldn’t trust you.’
‘Can I be at the surrender? I’d like to smash that Kitchener.’
‘No, it’s best if you go home.’
‘Perhaps so,’ the old man said, and without farewells he called for Van Doorn, and together they sought out Micah Nxumalo, and the three veterans headed north. When they reached the crest from which they could first see the lake, they looked down at the awful desolation of what had been their homes. Of De Groot’s farm, there were no signs except the charred stumps of the buildings, not six inches above the ground. Of Vrymeer, only the shells of the structures built by Tjaart van Doorn were visible. Of the place where Micah Nxumalo’s huts had stood, only the base of the rondavels remained.
The two white men did not speak. Sybilla was dead, and Sara, and the twins. Johanna was lost somewhere, and Jakob prayed that the boy Detlev was with her. When he turned to look toward the direction of the concentration camp, as if to find the children, he saw the matched peaks of Sannie’s Tits and they reminded him of the twins, those precious girls. He dropped his head. He had not the courage to go down the hill to that ruined farm, those vanished hopes.
General de Groot tugged at his arm: ‘Come, Jakob, much work to be done.’ And as the ponies moved forward, the old warrior said with clenched determination, ‘We lost the battles. We lost the war. Now we must win in other ways.’
The education of Detlev van Doorn began on the day he came over the hill with his sister from the concentration camp at Chrissie Meer and saw the devastation of his home. His father and old General de Groot were waiting in the ruins, and after the briefe
‘Never forget,’ the general said. ‘These women were murdered by the English, who fed them powdered glass.’
Detlev was seven, a little boy with the pinched features of an old man and the cautious wisdom of someone in his forties. ‘They were buried in the camp. They can’t be here.’
‘Their tombstones,’ De Groot said. ‘For remembrance.’
‘Those aren’t stones,’ Detlev said.
‘Later, when we have a farm again,’ his father said. ‘We’ll have proper stones.’
‘Wood or stone,’ De Groot said, ‘you must never forget.’
‘Where shall we stay?’ Johanna asked.
‘We’ve fixed up the old wagon,’ her father said, and he led his children to that frail relic in which his father, Tjaart van Doorn, had taken his family across the Drakensberg, then north of the Limpopo, and finally back to Vrymeer. Van Doorn and the general had locked the big wheels and used boards to form a kind of shelter on the wagon bed, but it clearly could not hold a young woman like Johanna, a boy and two grown men. When De Groot saw her look of perplexity, he laughed. ‘You two sleep up here. We two down below.’ And she saw that under the wagon body, her father had arranged boards on the ground, where he and the old man would make their beds.
On the first wintry night that the four spent together—no pillows, no blankets—Jakob awakened at dawn, and in the dim light saw over his head, carved into the heavy wood of the frame, the rubric TC–43 and he wondered what it signified. When De Groot awakened, Jakob asked, ‘What do you suppose this means?’ The old general squinted his eyes, studied the marks, and remained silent, as though brooding over something. Finally he grumbled, ‘One of the only two decent Englishmen I ever knew. Thomas Carleton built this wagon and he and Richard Saltwood gave it to your father. Yes, gave it.’ He reflected on the enormity of having taken refuge under an English wagon, then added, ‘I rode two thousand miles in this wagon … walking beside it most of the way.’