by Ann Harries
‘My name is Sarah Palmer. I appreciate your kindness, especially as you can surely tell from my accent that I am English.’ Sarah stumbles through all this Dutch, but Eva Theron smiles forgivingly.
‘Your Dutch is much better than my English, I can assure you. And it is a pleasure to hear the enemy speak our language.’
‘I don’t feel I am your enemy,’ says Sarah quietly.
‘Of course you are not yourself my enemy,’ says the Boer woman. Her face suddenly flushes. ‘But your people have taken our land for which our forefathers shed their blood. How can this land now be British?’ And she waves her hands at the vistas of yellow grass which bake like her bread in the warmth of the sun. ‘God gave us this land, my dear, and now for our sins He has deserted us.’
‘Your bread is burning, Mrs Theron.’ For the smell of smoke now overwhelms the pleasant farm aromas, and a pall hangs above the farmhouse.
The woman’s eyes harden. ‘That is what the British do to our farmhouses when we do not sign the oath of allegiance. This wind carries the smoke for many miles.’
‘What can I say?’ whispers Sarah. Her heart lurches painfully as the forbidden thought comes rushing in: does Patch do these things? But it is no longer a question. She has long known the truth about his column but querying that truth makes it easier to bear.
‘Last night a command led by De Wet tried to blow up the Kimberley railway line. So the farms near the line are blown up instead.’
‘And you?’ Flakes of ash settle on Sarah’s riding habit and Mrs Theron’s apron.
‘We are protected by British troops,’ says the woman simply. ‘We have signed, and for that we pay a terrible price.’ She swallows. ‘We are known as the hands-uppers, a horrible, insulting word. We are hated by those who will not sign, who will fight to the bitter end.’ She stares at Sarah in confusion. ‘To tell the truth we never wanted this war. But now we have the choice between the hatred of our brethren or the burning of our farm. Have we made the wrong choice?’
Sarah rides away. It would have been so much easier to return to Cape Town, where none of this horror would impinge on her life. She would pick flowers and drink tea at Dix’s. She would live in a lovely villa, not a battered bell tent. Has she too made the wrong choice?
Bloemfontein, November 1900
The streets of Bloemfontein, the Fountain of Flowers, are bearing a new kind of traffic. From Kimberley in the West, from Kroonstad in the North, from Koffiefontein in the South, from Sanna’s Pos in the East, from the burnt-out farms of the new Crown Colony trundle the endless lines of open ox wagons and mule carts and Scotch carts. They are laden, not with sacks of mielies or boxes of peaches or new blades for the windmill, but with mothers. Pretty young mothers, grim-faced old mothers, silent mothers, sulky mothers, panic-stricken mothers, tear-stained mothers, rich mothers, poor mothers, mothers large and small; mothers of mothers; mothers of children, who cling to a doll or a top or a favourite book with one hand and to a mother’s skirt with the other; mothers of children whose cheeks have burnt fiery red on the long journey in the summer sun; mothers of small, still bundles that lie in their arms and will not move again. Every mother and daughter wears a sun bonnet of a different style; some are plain white linen, some are adorned with a floral pattern; others are a concoction of frill upon frill, a wedding-cake of a hat, in contrast with the simple frocks that are mostly worn.
Herded alongside the wagons are more mothers. They are the servants of the mothers in the carts. Their homes too have been burned down, they too have nowhere to live. Their husbands and their brothers and sons now work for the British Army, helping them win the war against the Boers. These mothers and their children merge with the herds of cattle and goats that mounted black soldiers drive before the wagons. Oh how the cattle and the oxen bellow in hunger: they cry out for the comfort of their kraals. Their journey has been long; they have not had time to rest and graze; some of them collapse on the very streets of Bloemfontein.
British soldiers on horseback mill among the creaking wagons, the running servants, the staggering cattle, the wailing mothers, the ailing children. They have a job to do. They must keep the mothers and the livestock in order. They must drive their charges through the streets of this city, past the roses blooming so prettily to welcome them, past the willows dipping their leaves into the little stream, past the looted shops slowly recovering from the first arrival of the British, and into the fields beyond where preparations have been made.
The mothers disturb Sarah profoundly. She has written to tell Sophie of the endless processions through the streets of this little town. Already Sophie has responded angrily about the black camps and urged Sarah to approach the Loyal Ladies’ League for help. They can surely throw their womanly gentleness in the direction of these suffering black people? Sarah doubts this very much but will try.
Now, as she watches these cartloads of angry women creaking up the street she feels a sudden fury flare up. ‘So, are these families prisoners of war?’ she shouts up at a young officer prancing on his charger beside the wagons. He grins at the pretty nurse. ‘We are providing homes for the homeless, Sister. A humanitarian act of the British Army.’ ‘Homeless because you have set fire to their homes!’ she retorts. ‘All’s fair in love and war, m’dear,’ he smirks at her, then shouts at a trooper who has allowed a cow to stray into the Boer bakery and incurred the wrath of Mrs van Reenen, her hands coated in flour as she shoos the intruder away.
Where are all these women being taken? Sarah rides out towards the hands-uppers’ camp; reins in her pony at the top of the kopje – and sees what she had feared.
A vast grid of white triangles now enmeshes the hill. Oh, how exact is their symmetry – whichever way you look the tents stretch out in the straightest of lines, some parallel, some diagonal, each one equally spaced from the next with awesome precision. And in the epicentre of this geometrical perfection stand some corrugated iron huts and three marquees which look like hospitals, and on the edge, a number of crude country stores have erupted, suggesting that this mathematical masterpiece might serve a human purpose.
Sarah lifts her field glasses and follows the women and children’s movements. Some are standing in a long queue with buckets in their hands; others are jostling in even longer queues with plates and bags to receive food from a shouting corporal. Some carry bundles of washing; others are trying to light fires in the clay ovens with the green bushes their children have chopped down. A group of old people is singing hymns outside a tent round an enormous family Bible.
There are too many people in the tents, Sarah can see that. A whole family plus servants must fit into a bell tent meant for six, and often there are ten or more people squeezed under the canvas and between the possessions they have brought with them on their journey. These possessions spill out of the tent flaps for there is no room for basins and pots and pails and plates and spoons and coffee mills and pestles and mortars.
Where are the cattle of these farming people? Where are their sheep? Where are their crops, shining in the fields, ready for the harvest? Where are their pumpkins and gourds, ripening on the roofs? Where are their tapestries, their sofas with embroidered cushions, their jars of spiced peaches, their vases from the East, their babies’ cradles, their pianos?
Ask the troopers, who stroll among the tents keeping an eye on things. They can tell you what they have done with the cattle and the crops and the embroidered cushions and the pianos with their hymn books. They have laid them waste. They have obeyed the orders of Field-Marshal Lord Roberts. That’s what soldiers are trained to do, no matter what they might personally feel.
Sarah sits on her friendly pony and watches the horror unfold beneath her. Her instinct once again is to flee to Cape Town and forget she has ever seen this. She knows now that if she stays she cannot turn her back on this devastation.
She rides back to the Raadsaal, where evening meals are now held. On the notice board she sees an advertisement written in large le
tters: URGENT. WANTED: DUTCH-SPEAKING NURSE TO WORK IN BLOEMFONTEIN CONCENTRATION CAMPS.
She stares at this request for several minutes, then copies down the application details.
Orange River Colony, November 1900
Patch is feeling better. Since making his novena to Our Lady for the dead baby’s soul he has banished the recurring image of the infant in the soil, for now he knows that the little Protestant boy will be frolicking, diving among the sunlit clouds, juggling with the stars – for Mary, being the Mother of everyone, will certainly have agreed to his nine-day plea to ask her Son to allow the little Boer fellow into the Heaven designed for Catholics only. But with the disappearance of his torment, indifference has set in. His emotions feel as if they are coated in concrete.
Now he stacks furniture into a huge pile in the middle of the farmhouse sitting room. Outside the men are slitting the throats of cows and pigs. The air is full of the screaming of animals. The Boer children and the Kaffir servants are pulling sacks of corn and bits of furniture out of the farmhouse and piling them up on the ox wagon. The old people carry out the family Bible and the hymn books. The farmer’s wife clasps a baby’s cradle. She is pregnant.
Captain Smithers has explained about the railway attacks and Roberts’ regulations. It is as if he is attempting to impose a grid of order upon the mayhem he has created. The Boer himself is there but appears to be dying from an infected bullet wound. He too is carried out.
‘Why don’t the Boers give in?’ the captain asks the woman as she places the cradle in the wagon. ‘You would have been spared all this misery.’
The woman draws herself up and with flashing eyes replies, ‘For the very same reason for which our men began this war.’
‘You are right, they began the war and fired the first shot.’
‘And who provoked the war?’ demands the woman in her guttural but fluent English. ‘And were the Boers to sit with folded arms while gold and diamond grabbers come in swarms to snatch the inheritance of our children from under us? It is our misfortune and not our fault that Providence has placed stores of gold and diamonds beneath our soil as an inheritance for our children, which is now taken away from us.’
‘I don’t think your people realise to what extent they are outnumbered,’ says the captain. He means well; he does not like to be the Goliath, but would prefer an enemy equal in might. ‘For every Boer burgher there are seven or eight British soldiers.’
‘Including the kaffirs you have armed!’ she exclaims angrily.
‘Now why do you say kaffir? We do not use coloured people against you.’
‘Look at Mafeking,’ she retorts. ‘And look at the armed kaffirs continually passing between these wagons.’
‘They are only used as guards,’ replies he.
‘As if there are not Tommies enough to do this sort of work. What respect will these kaffirs have for white women after the war, over whose head they have stood with loaded rifles? Is that not degradation enough?’
‘The war must end soon enough now,’ he says, not angered by her inflammatory words. Indeed, he sounds almost melancholy. ‘We are laying the entire country waste. Your commandos will be starved out.’
She climbs into the cart and soothes her weeping children.
The troopers tear down curtains from the windows and stuff them in between the legs of the chairs. Patch himself throws paraffin over the pile and Cartwright applies a light. The men run around helping themselves to things before it is too late: china plates, bushbuck skins on the floor, a text on the wall with a tapestry or roses round it: God is mijne rots, ik sal of hem vetrouwen. God is my rock, I shall trust him.
The room is full of smoke. Cartwright is enjoying himself: he picks up a sewing machine and throws it wallop! through the works of the piano. Flames are crackling but the men scrabble through a chest of linen they have just found. Patch feels himself choking and runs outside where the kaffirs and Boers have gathered in their separate carts. He looks at the pile of household goods thrown into a box in the back of the ox wagon. There is nothing that interests him: kettle, sausage maker, coffee grinder, pestle and mortar, mincing machine, bowls, spoons. The sun is setting in its extravagant way, throwing ribbons of red and yellow and purple into the radiant sky. He runs his fingers among the implements to check for flags or guns. Then feels his concrete heart crack open with shock.
There it lies, underneath the kitchen implements, in all its orange and purple glory, a bit of the sunset fallen into the wagon. Every hair on his head stands on end individually, as if God is counting them. And look how his hand is shaking as he plunges it into the higgledy-piggledy mess and pulls out the sash. He pulls out the Orange sash and stares at it. He does not know what to do.
His hands pull the Orange sash across his breast. They reach into his top pocket. Slowly he winds up the music box and places it on the still-warm bread oven. The sweetness of home floods the purple air.
Then, out of the blazing house, bursts Cartwright with a crowd of troopers. They have thrown off their helmets and slouch hats and pulled on the womens’ bonnets instead. They have tied pantomime bows beneath their chins. They are delighted to hear the music playing on the bread oven, which acts as a vast clay loud-speaker. The bonneted men grab partners and caper round the oven in pairs. Their kappies flutter and flounce as they dance. They bow and curtsey to each other, shaking their heads, and smiling comically.
There’s no place, oh there’s no, oh there’s no place like home! sing the laughing men.
‘That’s enough now, men!’ calls Captain Smithers. ‘Show respect!’
Reluctantly the dancers begin to remove their bonnets. Cartwright pretends he can’t undo the bow under his chin. They are still laughing when the shot splits through the merriment, like the ring of an axe.
Now Cartwright is doing a kaffir war dance – leaping into the air with his arms and legs all over the place, as if trying to swim.
His white kappie has sprouted a red flower.
Patch runs over to his friend, who has collapsed on the ground and is still. Blood trickles out of his mouth. Cartwright is trying to smile. ‘Take the bonnet off my head, there’s a good fellow,’ he croaks. ‘Can’t die wearing a lady’s hat.’ Patch unties the bow under his friend’s chin and removes the sticky headdress with gentle fingers. Cartwright is looking at him hopefully as if Patch is about to reveal to him whether he will go to heaven or hell. Does he want a prayer? Patch can’t remember what prayers you say for dying people. It is too late for a novena. For a moment he wishes he had his rosary to wind through his friend’s fingers.
‘I’ll get the bastard,’ he says instead.
Cartwright’s eyes are fluttering. He chokes. Patch lowers his ears. ‘A good fuck,’ wheezes Cartwright. ‘That’s all that matters. In the end. Remember that, old chum.’
‘I will,’ promises Patch, though wondering briefly if this is true. ‘I will, my friend.’ And folds Cartwright’s hands across his chest. At least it is death by the bullet rather than the bacillus.
As he stands up he realises his body has become a different thing now; he feels the hot surge of a new emotion, which sweeps away any other feeling. The word revenge! springs into his head. To kill the killers, that is all that matters now. There is a sweetness to this new emotion.
‘Find the sniper!’ roars Captain Smithers.
The men run off into the darkening veldt, their eyes dazzled by the setting of the sun. But who is there to shoot? Patch is desperate to kill, to kill a Boer, any Boer. He kneels motionless behind a rock. The Sash still crosses his chest, its fringes ruffling in the soft wind. He perches the barrel of his gun on the rock.
A bullet whines past his head, then another. They might just as well be mosquitoes. There is an explosion – mortar, perhaps. It seems to shatter in his leg. Yet there is no pain. He places his hand on his leg to check. And passes out as his hand slides into a stew of blood and flesh that has replaced the muscles of his thigh.
Rossett
i Mansions, London, November 1900
‘Another seven refusals, I’m afwaid.’ Miss Griffen places seven letters on a rather large pile marked NO.
‘Humph! Who are the cowards?’ Emily looks up from the begging letter she is writing to the Rowntree family.
‘The Reverend Hugh Price-Hughes, the Reverend A.H. Stanton – who, by the way, says that to keep Boer women alive might pwolong the war. The Reverend Price-Hughes, on the other hand, feels his support of our committee might cast a reflection on the honour of the British soldiers, whom he knows to be gentlemen because Lord Woberts has told us so.’
Emily puts down her pen. ‘And to think these are clergymen. Well, Griffy, we are receiving quite an education in the lack of imagination in the saintly, and the fear of those with influence in case their big reputations be marred.’
‘But let us not forget the support of your committee – such wonderful people, also with big weputations – Herbert Spencer, Sir Edward Fwy, Sir Thomas Acland, the Marchioness of Wipon, your own dear aunt and uncle …’ says Miss Griffen before Emily can become too bitter.
‘I shall never forget them, dear Mary. But I find it quite extraordinary that so many important people are too frightened to voice their support of a committee whose aim is to feed and clothe destitute women and children. I shall not forget them either.’
‘Well, at least Lady Hobhouse has secured the approval of Lord Lansdowne and Mr Chamberlain – pwovided, of course, the food and clothing don’t reach the enemy in the field. And several donations have arrived today. I have already witten to thank them. Just think – we now have something like three hundred pounds in the Fund!’ Miss Griffen’s eyes shine behind her spectacles.
‘Yet England’s contribution to those destitute families is far lower than that of other countries.’ The new batch of refusals has annoyed Emily: she turns her mind to more positive developments. ‘Of course, as one might expect, the Society of Friends has done such wonderful work I could almost turn Quaker myself, so much do I admire their breed, to say nothing of the Women’s Congress in the Cape Colony. I have received such a vivid account of their great open-air gathering in Cape Town from a Miss Molteno. She describes how the women stood in the blazing sun beneath the oak trees and solemnly protested against the burning of private property by the military—’