by John Buchan
So before I had been many months in the country I had the problem of the land fairly on my shoulders, and had to spend much of my time on the road. Long before the War ended I was travelling far and wide, often in areas where fighting was going on, and I was fairly often in difficulties. I have ridden many miles faster than I cared, to avoid losing my breeches to a commando whose clothing had given out. As soon as peace came an agricultural department was started and we engaged experts from all over the world at high salaries — to the disgust of certain sections in Johannesburg, who regarded as misspent all public monies which did not go to the mines. For some reason or other I was selected as the scapegoat by these critics, and even the farmers, whom we were trying to benefit, were suspicious. Yet I believe — and I have Louis Botha’s word for it — that no part of Milner’s reconstruction so amply justified itself as his agricultural policy. But our hopes of land settlement were disappointed. There came lean years in the mining industry which spoilt the market for farm produce; we had underrated, too, the difficulties of South African farming when higher standards were aimed at than the simple pastoralism of the veld. My chief interest was in co-operative settlements, which would have sold and bought in bulk and had their own factories to work up their products, but I found that the men of our race are not easily induced to co-operate.
Those were wonderful years for me, years of bodily and mental activity, of zeal and hope not yet dashed by failure. I learned perforce a little about a great many things and a good deal about one or two things. Having always been something of a farmer I plunged happily into a dozen new kinds of farming. I had to be in some degree a jack-of-all-trades — transport-rider, seeds-man, stockman, horsecoper, merchant, lawyer, not to speak of diplomatist. By and by we had proper departments with chiefs and staffs, but at first it was almost a one-man show, and I tried to avoid worrying Milner more than I could help. I trust that my work was of some benefit to the country; it was beyond doubt of enormous benefit to myself. For I came to know and value a great variety of human beings, and to know and love one of the most fascinating lands on earth.
IV
My first group of new friends came from the British army, of which hitherto I had known nothing. I made the acquaintance of some of the High Command, who were to be famous figures in the Great War, but my knowledge was chiefly of junior officers and the rank and file. In this way I learned something of that wonderful brotherhood, the old regular army, which came to an end at First Ypres. Many of the troops had been in India and they opened up for me a new world of experience. It was now that I acquired an interest in military history and the art of war which has never left me. “Shop,” the talk of an expert on his own subject, has always seemed to me the best kind of conversation, and my appetite for military “shop” was prodigious.
Also I first came in touch with the men of the Dominions — South Africans of the various irregular corps, Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders. Batches of them were seconded to assist me in various jobs, and I had their company in many starlit bivouacs. At Oxford we had had a few colonials, but they were soon absorbed into the atmosphere of the place and seemed to lose their idiom. I had regarded the Dominions patronisingly as distant settlements of our people who were making a creditable effort under difficulties to carry on the British tradition. Now I realised that Britain had at least as much to learn from them as they had from Britain. I found something new to me, something in their outlook at once imaginative and realistic which I had never met before. They were an audacious folk, very ready, if need be, to throw rule and convention overboard, and often I was saved by their sagacious lawlessness. Yet in a sense they were stiffer traditionalists than the British. They combined a passionate devotion to their own countries with the vision of a great brotherhood based on race and a common culture, a vision none the less real because they rarely tried to put it into words. I began to see that the Empire, which had hitherto been only a phrase to me, might be a potent and beneficent force in the world.
The civilian population of Johannesburg was the whipping-boy of the anti- government press and politicians. It scarcely deserved this malign preeminence. Those of British stock were the ordinary mercantile community to be found in any English city, worthy people, many of whom had fought gallantly in regiments like the Imperial Light Horse. Some of them, like Percy FitzPatrick, George Farrar and Abe Bailey, were far-sighted and patriotic citizens. There was a big cosmopolitan admixture, inevitable in a mining centre, which had its proportion of riff raff, but also its able and honest element. Johannesburg, both on its good and bad side, was like any new urban growth in the British Empire or the United States, where individual wealth has come before a civic tradition could be established. But it had one unique feature which has never been repeated — the overshadowing influence of a great personality.
I had met Cecil Rhodes several times in England. He knew that he was dying, and he did not want to die. He asked me my age. “You will see it all,” he said bitterly, “and I won’t, for I am going out.” He gave me various pieces of advice. One was to beware of the vain man. “You can make your book with roguery,” he said, “but vanity is incalculable — it will always let you down.” He died at his cottage near Cape Town during my first months in Africa, and his funeral in the Matoppo hills and the publication of his will were events which for the moment switched our attention away from the War. He impressed me greatly — the sense he gave one of huge but crippled power, the reedy voice and the banal words in which he tried to express ideas which represented for him a whole world of incoherent poetry. I did not know him well enough to like him or dislike him, but I felt him as one feels the imminence of a thunderstorm. But I did not realise the greatness of his personality until I had been some time in the country. Then I found that in all sorts of people — simple farmers and transport-riders, commonplace business men, Jewish financiers who otherwise would have had no thought but for their bank accounts, even trivial, intriguing politicians — he had kindled some spark of his own idealism. He had made them take long views. Common as their minds might be, some window had been opened which gave them a prospect. They had acquired at least a fragment of a soul. If it be not genius thus to brood over a land and have this power over the human spirit, then I do not understand the meaning of the word.
Very slowly I came to know something of the Dutch. While the War lasted, of course, I saw nothing of them except a few National Scouts. The army was in the habit of praising the Boer at the expense of the uitlander; he was a good fighter and a sportsman with the virtues of a squirearchy, and not the get-rich-quick offscourings of European capitals. This attitude was so manifestly unfair that in my revolt against it I was in danger of acquiring an anti-Dutch prejudice. At Vereeniging I saw the Boer generals, lean men browned by sun and wind, whose ragged clothes seemed to enhance their dignity. It was my privilege later to know some of them well; Louis Botha, built on lines of a primitive simplicity and wise with an elemental wisdom; Smuts, the acute legal intelligence and the philosophic mind who saw the problems of the day in the light of eternal principles — the two statesmen who between them made the early grant of responsible government to the new colonies a success, when otherwise it might have been a fiasco. De la Rey had a face which I have never seen equalled for antique patriarchal dignity. He offered to take me on his staff in the next war, which in his view was to be fought by the British and Dutch against the Jews; it would have been a real Armageddon, for among the Jews I think he classed all foreigners except Americans!
After Vereeniging in my repatriation and land settlement work I lived much among the country Boers. I had little love for the slick Afrikander of the towns, but for the veld farmer I acquired a sincere liking and respect. He had many of the traits of my Lowland Scots, keen at a bargain and prepared to imperil his immortal soul for a threepenny bit, but ready to squander pounds in hospitality. When I spent the night at a farm and at family worship listened to Dutch psalms sung to familiar Scottish psalm-tunes,
I might have fancied myself in Tweedsmuir. I knew all types: progressives who were pioneers in dry farming; the old takhaar of the back-veld who was a remnant of a vanished world; and I think I must have met the last of the great Boer hunters, whose lives were spent far beyond the edge of civilisation and to whom the War signified nothing. I was a Scot, a Presbyterian, and a countryman, and therefore was half-way to being a kinsman.
It happened that I met some of my friends again. In the Great War I was much with the South African Infantry Brigade, and at the request of General Smuts I wrote its history. That brigade was a superb fighting unit; three times it was annihilated, and each time — at Delville Wood, at Marrières Wood and on the Lys — its sacrifice saved the British Front: About one-third of its members were Dutch and most of them had fought against Britain; some indeed had been in revolt against the peace terms and had long refused the oath of allegiance. Now they were fighting with complete conviction beside their old antagonists. History has seen many fine stocks brought within the pale of our Empire, but none stronger and finer than this one which turned defeat into victory and led captivity captive.
V
But it is the land itself which holds my memory.
Wordsworth had long been my favourite poet. This was partly on intellectual grounds, for he seemed to me to rank very high in the hierarchy of literature, and partly because he was the authentic voice of my own Borderland. His mild pantheism suited a landscape instinct with human traditions and wholly fitted for human life. His Nature was Natura Benigna, austere, with moments of an awful sublimity, but not inimical to the hopes and habits of men — a half-tame, habitable world built on the human scale, interpenetrated with human history, and readily taking the colour of human dreams. But, as Mr. Aldous Huxley has pointed out in one of his essays, there is also Natura Maligna, where the Wordsworthian philosophy means nothing. Mr. Huxley’s instance is the cruel, obscene superabundance of a tropical forest. I have had the same feeling of malevolence in a place like the delta of the Mackenzie, where the river pours its billions of tons of foul water through bottomless mires scummed with coarse vegetation; or on a mountain range like the Alaskan, which is not passive like the Alps under man’s efforts, but seems to react savagely against him.
In South Africa one does not feel the malevolence of Nature, not even in the Limpopo or Zambesi swamps or the Kalahari desert, so much as its utter aloofness from human life. Snug little homes may be carved out of the wilds, but a thousand of them have no effect upon the wilds, which are waiting to swallow them up as soon as our efforts slacken. A hundred Johannesburgs would not change the country’s character. It seems not to take the impress of man. Its history — and South Africa has a long history — the story of the ancient earth-dwellers, of the great Bantu migrations, of generations of adventurers from the Sabaeans to the Chartered Company, is as evanescent as a cloud shadow. You will find it in the books, but somehow it is not in the atmosphere and never will be. There is nothing cruel in the blue days and starry nights, the tempests and droughts and summer heats, but there is something eternally aloof.
“Lo! for there among the flowers and grasses
Only the mightier movement sounds and passes;
Only winds and rivers,
Life and death.”
It was a refreshment to be in a world so superbly impersonal, so divinely inhuman, and I found Wordsworth irrelevant. Indeed, I discovered that I did not want any sort of literature, with one curious exception. This was Euripides. I had never greatly cared for him, but for some obscure reason I took to reading him on the veld.
The country is like an inverted pie-dish, a high tableland sloping steeply to the ocean on south and east, less steeply to the Zambesi in the north. Its selvedge of coast land is temperate in the south, and as it sweeps north becomes sandy desert or tropical flats. The pie-dish contains every variety of landscape. In the Cape peninsula you have the classic graces of Italy, stony, sun-baked hills rising from orchards and vineyards and water-meadows. On the high veld you have grey-green plains, which carry the eye to an immense distance. The mountain rim from the Drakensberg to the Rhodesian scarp breaks down in wild kloofs and pinnacles to the bushveld; and the streams, which begin as strings of pools on the veld, are transformed first into torrents and then into sluggish tropical rivers. That is the general configuration, but there are a thousand hidden nooks which recall to every traveller his own home, for it is the most versatile of lands. Yet there is a certain subtle unity in the landscape, something indefinable which we know to be South African. This has much to do with the climate, which I take to be the best in the world, not because there are no discomforts — for there are many — but because no climate that I know produces so keen a sense of wellbeing. One could go supperless to bed in the rain on the bare veld, and awake whistling from pure lightheartedness. Whoever has once drunk Vaal water, says the proverb, will always return, and for certain the old enchantress lays a spell which is ill to loose. The scent of a dung fire or wood smoke or mimosa, the creak of a wagon axle, a mule coughing in the dust, and a dozen other little things are still to me as evocative of memories as the “smell of the wattles in Lichtenburg” was to Mr. Kipling’s Australian.
There was little of the country which I did not see, from the Cape peninsula, where from shining seas the staircase of the hills climbs to the many-coloured Karroo, to the dull green forests of the Zambesi. But it was the northern plateau which I explored intensively: the castled summits of Mont aux Sources and Basutoland, where the streams descend in sheer veils of lawn to Natal; the scarp whence one looks into the Swaziland and Zululand glens, and, further north, across a hundred miles of bush to the dim outline of the Lebombo; the ridges which huddle behind Lydenburg into the sunset; the lake country of Ermelo; the endless spaces of the high veld; the Zoutpansberg and other ranges of the north, honeycombed with caves and secret waters; the Limpopo running its fantastic course from its springs on the edge of the Rand through high veld and bushveld to the lush flats of Mozambique. I used every kind of transport — Cape cart, mule wagon, horses of all kinds from half- broken Argentines and Texans to handy little Boer ponies — anything Remounts provided, for in those days we could not be particular. Often I had company, but often I had lonely rides and solitary bivouacs. There is something to be said for leaving youth a good deal alone that it may discover itself.
Two pictures I have always carried to cheer me in dismal places. One is of a baking noon on the high veld, the sky a merciless blue, the brown earth shimmering in a heat haze. I am looking into a wide hollow where a red road like a scar descends and disappears over the next ridge. In the bottom there is a white farm with a clump of gum trees, a blue dam, and blue water-furrows threading a patch of bright green alfalfa. An outspan fire is sending up spirals of milky blue smoke. A hawk is hovering far above, but there are no sounds except the drone of insects, and very far off the jar of an ungreased axle. The air is hot but not heavy, pungent and aromatic. I have never had such a sense of brooding primeval peace, as from that sun-drenched bowl brimming with essential light.
The other picture is the Wood Bush in the North Transvaal which lies between Pietersburg and the eastern flats. You climb to it through bare foothills where the only vegetation is the wait-a-bit thorn, and then suddenly you cross a ridge and enter a garden. The woods of big timber trees are as shapely as the copses in a park laid out by a landscape-gardener. The land between them is rich meadow, with, instead of buttercups and daisies, the white arum lily and the tall blue agapanthus. In each cup is a stream of clear grey-blue water, swirling in pools and rapids like a Highland salmon river. These unite to form the Bruderstroom which, after hurling itself over the plateau’s edge, becomes a feeder of the Olifants. Here is a true lodge in the wilderness, with on the one side the stony Pietersburg uplands, and on the other the malarial bushveld. The contrast makes a profound impression, since the Wood Bush itself is the extreme of richness and beauty. The winds blow as clean as in mid-ocean, soil and veg
etation are as wholesome as an English down. I have entered the place from different sides — by the precipitous road up the Bruderstroom, by the Pietersburg highway, from the north along the scarp, and once from the bushveld by a tributary glen where my Afrikander pony had to do some rock-climbing; and on each occasion I seemed to be crossing the borders of a temenos, a place enchanted and consecrate. I resolved to go back in my old age, build a dwelling, and leave my bones there.
VI
In South Africa I recovered an experience which I had not known since my childhood, moments, even hours, of intense exhilaration, when one seemed to be a happy part of a friendly universe. The cause, no doubt, was largely physical, for my long treks made me very fit in body; but not wholly, for I have had the same experiences much later in life when my health was far from perfect. They came usually in the early morning or at sunset. I seemed to acquire a wonderful clearness of mind and to find harmony in discords and unity in diversity, but to find these things not as conclusions of thought, but in a sudden revelation, as in poetry or music. For a little, beauty peeped from the most unlikely wrappings and everything had a secret purpose of joy. It was the mood for poetry had I been anything of a poet.
“I was all ear
And took in strains that might create a soul
Under the ribs of death.”
Looking back I find my South African memories studded with those high moments. One especially Stands out. I had been ploughing all day in the black dust of the Lichtenburg roads, and had come very late to a place called the Eye of Malmani — Malmani Oog — the spring of a river which presently loses itself in the sands of the Kalahari. We watered our horses and went supperless to bed. Next morning I bathed in one of the Malmani pools — and icy cold it was — and then basked in the early sunshine while breakfast was cooking. The water made a pleasant music, and near by was a covert of willows filled with singing birds. Then and there came on me the hour of revelation, when, though savagely hungry, I forgot about breakfast. Scents, sights and sounds blended into a harmony so perfect that it transcended human expression, even human thought. It was like a glimpse of the peace of eternity.