The Covenant: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  When he reached the Trianon vineyards to commandeer the best part of their bottling, Saltwood found that his wife had come east from Cape Town to share a few days with him, and from her he learned that the war had taken a dramatic turn, about which he had heard nothing.

  Maud was worried: ‘Frank, do you think General Roberts is justified in this move?’

  ‘It’s brilliant. Two armies concentrating on the last railroad the Boers have. It’ll end the war.’

  ‘I don’t mean the railroad. I mean the scorched earth.’ He would always remember that she was incredibly beautiful as she first uttered these words: the sunlight of Trianon fell on her auburn hair, outlining the wondrous curls and twists she used for controlling it, and her eyes glowed with that intensity she had shown when first he met her. War and decisions were forgotten as he leaned over to kiss her, but after a kind of routine compliance she returned to her concern.

  ‘Yes, he’s given orders to the burghers: “Lay down your arms or we will burn your farms and devastate your fields. If you fight, you will starve.” ’ She took a deep breath. ‘Really, Frank, is that decent warfare?’

  ‘Well, they’re a difficult enemy. You scotch them here, they break out there. I hadn’t heard of the new order …’

  She produced a copy, signed by General Roberts, and he saw that she had reported it correctly. ‘Looks sensible to me. We’ve defeated them, you know—totally defeated them—and these regulations apply only to the scattered remnants.’

  ‘But they sound so barbaric. They don’t sound like my England at all. They sound like Genghis Khan.’

  ‘These are the mopping-up days of the war, Maud. We’re gleaning the last sheaves.’

  ‘Then why are you here buying wine for your stupid general?’

  ‘Maud, he’s not stupid. He’s a man who knows exactly what he’s doing, although I didn’t use to think so.’

  ‘But why the wine?’

  Her chin tilted forward, and the hardness which she could command when confronted by stupidity showed itself. Frank became irritated by her questioning and blurted out: ‘Because he likes to have an orderly mess, even in wartime. And he does so because he’s the nephew of a great duke, who gives him the money to spend as he sees fit. He sees fit to buy champagne, that’s why.’

  It was a silly answer and he realized this as soon as the words were spoken. ‘It’s been a long, trying year,’ he said. ‘But I’ve grown fond of Old Buller, and you’d be ashamed of me if I deserted him now.’

  ‘I’m sorry if I spoke harshly,’ she said with such sweet innocence that he had to embrace her, but even as he kissed her, she returned to her concern: ‘Is General Buller burning farms?’

  ‘He could never do that. He fights armies, not women and children.’

  ‘But it’s an order. From Roberts.’

  Frank laughed. ‘I’ve learned one splendid lesson from Buller. If a stupid order comes down, ignore it.’

  ‘But is he burning farms?’

  ‘Darling, he’s a wonderful, bumbling old fool, who has more sense of warfare than all the others. He’ll fight this war his way, with good food, and sparkling Trianon, and plenty of rest for his men. And do you know what? In the end he’ll win.’

  On his side of the battle lines, General de Groot was encountering difficulty. Despite an occasional dashing sortie like his attack on the English cavalry, he was so stuck in routine that more of his commando had left him to affiliate with larger units engaged in the serious efforts of the war. The Venloo Commando now consisted of the general himself and ninety horsemen, plus their blacks. To keep it any longer in existence was ridiculous, and one afternoon the council told him so.

  Standing before his men in his double-breasted frock coat—tattered and ruined, its silver buttons gone—and his tall top hat, he was a forlorn figure, a fat old man of sixty-eight whom the world had passed by. ‘Commandant-general says we must join Tobias Brand’s commando.’

  ‘We’re ninety men!’ Van Doorn protested. ‘We can still fight as a unit.’

  ‘No. We must obey orders. Our commando is no more.’

  ‘But it would be humiliating—to take orders from someone else, after you’ve been a general.’

  ‘Not to me. I don’t care where I fight.’ He summoned Sybilla, and in the presence of his men, said, ‘Old lady, they tell me I must surrender my command and fight under Tobias Brand.’

  ‘He’s a good man,’ she said. ‘I’ll fetch the wagon.’

  But when they rode over to Brand’s camp, with Van Doorn sharing the wagon, the younger general said, ‘You understand who’s in command?’ And De Groot said, ‘You are, Tobias.’

  Now Brand objected to having Sybilla along, for she was much older than the women in his commando, but Paulus pleaded: ‘This beaten wagon is her only home. We have fought side by side for sixty years.’ So she resumed her position at the rear of a column, this one commanded by a stranger. On hot days when she could shoot an antelope she would make biltong for the long treks that she knew lay ahead.

  Anyone who looked even casually at the map of South Africa could see what the strategy of the English forces had to be, and De Groot listened as the combat generals explained what they must do to keep the Boer republics alive: ‘The railroad to Lourenço Marques is our only link with the world outside. It must be kept open. We’ve already lost it east of Pretoria, but we dare not lose this part.’ A brief flick of the finger indicated all that remained: only the area between Middleburg and the Portuguese border, including the two remarkable villages of Waterval-Boven (Above-the-Waterfall) and Waterval-Onder (Under-the-Waterfall), for here in the space of a few miles the whole face of Africa changed.

  The Elands River, coming down off the high plateau, cut a deep gorge through soft rock, creating a beautiful tumbling waterfall from which the villages took their names, but this was not the spectacular character of the place. Waterval-Boven, at the edge of the high plateau, was a typical veld settlement, with harsh landscape, wide stretches of almost barren land and a forbidding aspect. Then came the plunging drop, and at Waterval-Onder one was in the lush lowlands, with high humidity, twisting vines and a richness of grass and tree that was startling.

  In the winter of 1900, when the Transvaal republic was falling apart, the two Watervals became the focus of world attention, for to the high one came Oom Paul Kruger, seventy-five years old, stooped and weary, a president losing his country. From his railway carriages, he tried to hold his nation together, wincing when he learned that districts upon which he had depended were gone. He had not wanted to leave Pretoria and was especially grieved at being forced to abandon his old wife, but here he was near the end of the railway line.

  Men leading the commandos came to see him and spoke reverently of his accomplishments in the past: ‘Oom Paul, we’re near the park you set aside for the animals. The lions and giraffes send you thanks.’

  ‘Little help you voracious men gave me in arguing for the park. All you wanted to do was shoot elephants for their tusks.’

  When General de Groot came by to pay his respects, Kruger said, ‘I hear you’re keeping Sybilla with you. Splendid idea, Paulus. Boer women thrive on battle.’

  ‘You and I are the only ones left who were in the Great Trek,’ Paulus said, and tears came into his eyes as he recalled those days.

  ‘Wasn’t Mzilikazi a fearful enemy?’ Kruger asked. ‘He fought us all day, killing and slaying, then prayed with the English missionaries all night, telling them how his heart bled for his people.’ The weary president shook his head, then added, ‘I must say, I’ve never cared much for missionaries. How can the Bible produce such a bad lot?’

  ‘They use a different Bible,’ De Groot said.

  Kruger slapped his leg. ‘I agree, Paulus. The Bible in English, it doesn’t sound the same. They do something to it.’

  ‘What will you do, Oom Paul, if the English come down the railway line?’

  ‘They want me to go to Europe. To stir up the nations. Fi
nd allies for us in our struggle.’

  As the two old Pauls spoke, a cadre of officers came to the railway coach to inform them of disturbing news: ‘We’re taking you down to Waterval-Onder. Safer down there.’

  At the new headquarters, De Groot was assigned the pleasant job of serving as a kind of liaison between the Boers up on the veld and President Kruger sitting in a small white house down among the tropical growth, where the air was soft and warm. But within days news of the war grew ominous: ‘Oom Paul, General Roberts is coming at us along the railway line. General Buller moves up from the south.’ And then Paul Kruger demonstrated just how deeply he believed in the covenant his people had made with the Lord.

  ‘De Groot, I want you to help me draft a last message to your Venloo burghers,’ he said, and laboriously, but with a kind of grandeur in their hearts, the two old men, veterans of the Great Trek to freedom, lined out the message, parts of which would be memorized by the Venloo men to whom it was read:

  Burghers, in all ages the Craven Beast has had the power to persecute Christ. Today, when God’s nation put here by Him to defend the Word is assailed by His enemies, every man who loves God must rise to defend Him. The time is at hand when God’s people are to be tried in fire, and those who are true to the faith and fight on in the name of the Lord shall be received in Heaven and enter into everlasting Glory. To those who talk of surrender I say that is a falling away from God. To those who are forced to lay down their arms and take an oath I say, ‘Go in again at the first opportunity and continue fighting.’ And to all I say that we fight on the side of God, and He will surely protect us. Read this message to officers and burghers at every opportunity.

  When General de Groot took the message up to be copied and circulated, he learned that Waterval-Boven was in peril from approaching English forces. When he returned to Oom Paul’s little house, he stood for some moments among the trees, looking through the window at the bearded man who was about to lose the republic he had worked so diligently to bring into being, and tears started to his eyes, but he fought them back: Nou is nie de die tyd, De Groot! (Now is not the time.)

  Entering the room Kruger used as his office, he said brusquely, ‘Oom Paul, you’ve got to go. A ship will meet you at Lourenço Marques.’

  ‘I cannot go,’ the old man said, but he went.

  In doing so, he created a profound moral problem for Boer historians. They would find it impossible to say flatly that in time of deepest crisis their president had fled his country, abandoning it to the enemy. They would devise all sorts of explanations, all kinds of justifications: ‘He went to enlist allies. He went to represent us in foreign capitals. He took our gold to safekeeping. We sent him away, he didn’t go.’ But the fact would always remain that history was replete with examples of other beleaguered leaders who had refused to quit their native lands in time of crisis—so many, that it had become the honorable tradition. When William the Norman invaded England, Harold the Saxon felt it incumbent upon him to resist, and he did, to the death. When the Muslims invaded Spain, the Spanish king held fast, and from a cave battled back. When Pizarro sacked the Inca empire, the Inca did not flee; and when Cortez attacked Mexico, Montezuma stayed to defend his land. Even in South African history, when Colonel Gordon surrendered Cape Town to the invading English, he felt it necessary in the tradition of military honor to commit suicide, which he did; and when Marthinus Steyn, president of the Orange Free State faced utter defeat, he sent the English a telegram: ‘We shall never surrender!’ and he fought on with his commandos. It would be difficult to find another major example in which the elected ruler of a country abandoned it, and his old wife, and his trek companions, but Oom Paul Kruger did, and the explanations he gave while wandering futilely from court to court in Europe sounded hollow.

  For his strange behavior there might be political justification; an effort did have to be made to keep his nation alive, and help from Europe might have been the only practical solution. But it is impossible to conjure up any explanation as to why an old man like this would abandon his wife of many years. When word reached him in Europe that she had died back in Pretoria, he wept.

  * * *

  Boer intelligence, which was usually good because of a more intimate knowledge of the battle terrain, saw clearly what the English generals were up to: ‘Roberts marches east along the railway line. Kitchener reinforces his rear. That’s the approach we must protect.’

  ‘What about Buller moving up from the south?’

  ‘He never gets anywhere on time. You can forget that approach.’

  So near Bergendal Farm the Boers fortified a big red hill upon which the security of their entire line depended. If that hill was captured, English cannon could destroy the Boer lines, and the war would be over.

  It was a formidable target, sloping sides leading up to a plateau about three acres in size and covered with huge scattered boulders, like an untidy playground of giants. It was held by one of the stoutest of the Boer units—a group of Johannesburg policemen, the toughest in the nation, who were prepared to die.

  With his bumbling instinct for seeing simple solutions to complex problems, General Buller, arriving belatedly as the battle loomed, saw that the big red hill formed the hinge of the Boer forces, and that if it fell, the entire enemy position must collapse. ‘It looks like Spion Kop,’ he said as his heavy guns swung into position. ‘But this time I’ll be in charge.’ So while Lords Roberts and Kitchener approached from the west with copybook tactics, Buller thundered ahead on his own and invested the hill.

  This time his tactics were impeccable, and while Roberts and Kitchener stared with mouths agape, his horde of naval guns blasted the hill with lyddite for three awful hours, blowing entire boulders apart. Then his men stormed the redoubt, slew most of the Johannesburg policemen, and fractured the Boer lines.

  It was the last pitched battle of the war, and when it was over, Buller wrote to his wife: ‘Here I am, as happy as a pig … Today I have a very nice telegram from the Queen … I defeated the army … while Lord Roberts’ army, which had got there before me, had missed the chance and had to sit looking on. What a beast I am!’

  Redvers Buller had won the war.

  In London there were fantastic celebrations. The old queen, fresh from her Sixtieth Jubilee, decided on her own that her personal friend, Lord Roberts, had been responsible for the victory. She insisted that he be elevated to the rank of earl, admitted into the Order of the Garter and promoted to commander-in-chief. As Field Marshal Lord Roberts, he received from a grateful nation a vast estate and a cash gift of £100,000, a huge fortune in those days. He had brought the war to an end, and England rejoiced.

  But General Buller was not forgotten. As soon as the war ended he was whisked aboard ship and hustled to England, where he was given a prestigious job in the military and a score of resounding state dinners, in which one city after another handed him ornate silver testimonials in the form of old-style Roman marshal’s batons inscribed with the roster of his victories: ‘Conqueror of the Tugela, Relief of Ladysmith, Hero of the High Veld.’ His picture in tight little battle cap appeared everywhere, and it was agreed that he was perhaps the finest fighting general that England had ever produced.

  Of course, some years later, when the facts of Spion Kop surfaced, all hell broke loose, and generals in the military establishment hounded him, charging him with lack of leadership. He was dragged before boards of inquiry, where his testimony was not inspiring. These attacks by envious rivals seemed not to worry him, for he surrendered none of the public acclaim which he adored, and to his home in the country came a constant queue of men who had fought under him in South Africa to assure him that he was the finest general they had ever known. As one conscripted soldier told the press: ‘When you fought under Buller, things went slower, but you did eat well.’

  On the morning that Lord Roberts knelt before his sovereign to become an earl and a Knight of the Garter, a group of tired flop-hatted Boers met secretly at a
farm west of Pretoria. Louis Botha was present, Koos de la Rey the brilliant improvisator and Paulus de Groot the bulldog, and a brilliant young fellow all ice and steel, Jan Christian Smuts.

  They had no settled government, no railway line to the outside world, no guaranteed arms supply, no replacement of horses, no system of conscription to fill their ranks, and no money. They were as defeated a group of men as military history provided; they had been mauled and chased almost off the continent, but there was not one among them prepared to put his hands up.

  ‘The situation is this,’ Louis Botha said. ‘Lord Kitchener has two hundred thousand men in arms right now. And he can get two hundred thousand more. We have maybe twenty thousand burghers in the field. That’s twenty-to-one against us, plus their ships, their heavy guns, the support of their empire. But what we have is knowledge of this land and determination.’

  For some hours the discussion continued, and there was still not a leader there who was not ready to continue the conflict perpetually against the English. They drafted plans which only a fool would have accepted, and they applauded the daring. When someone said, ‘The sensible thing to do is attack Cape Town; that will encourage the Cape Dutch to join at last,’ four different commandants volunteered to undertake this incredible mission.

  ‘The bulk of Kitchener’s force will have to play policeman,’ Botha predicted. ‘He’ll need a hundred thousand, maybe two hundred thousand, just to hold on to what they think they’ve got.’

  On and on went the wild discussion, until a listener might have thought that these were victors planning their next campaign, and as they talked and encouraged one another, the tremendous determination of these Boers manifested itself: ‘Our women will be with us. Our children will find a way to help.’

  Paulus de Groot took no part in formulating these soaring plans, but they were confirmed when he jammed on his worn top hat, fastened his coat with the two safety pins that had replaced the lost silver buttons, and said, ‘The battles are over. Now the war begins.’