The Covenant: A Novel

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The Covenant: A Novel Page 102

by James A. Michener


  When the drive against the commando-homesteads was well under way, and the Boer territories further denuded of women and farms and cattle, leaving only smoking ruins, Kitchener began to see good results. Three commandants, unable to survive against starvation and barbed wire, voluntarily surrendered, but before doing so their top men crept away to join up with General de Groot, whose forces now reached their maximum: four hundred and thirty hardened men, a hundred extra ponies and fifty blacks. This would be the final army, led by an old man approaching seventy.

  Pleased with the apparent effectiveness of the concentration camp, Lord Kitchener summoned Major Saltwood one morning and gave him an order: ‘Burn Vrymeer and herd the women into the camp at Chrissie Meer.’

  ‘Are you sure you want to do this, sir?’

  ‘I am,’ the steely-eyed general said, ‘and I deem it best if you lead the men, rather than an Englishman.’

  ‘I think of myself as an Englishman, sir, and I don’t relish assignments like this.’

  ‘I consider you a local, Saltwood. It’ll look better.’

  So with a mixed detachment of seventy, including troops from various colonies, Saltwood rode east on the Lourenço Marques train, disembarked his horses at Waterval-Boven, and rode slowly south toward the lake—a journey he had taken in happier times. When he reached Venloo and saw the heavy price it had paid in this war, all windows shattered, a feeling of despair came over him, and he remembered what Maud had said that day at Trianon: ‘Seems more like Genghis Khan.’

  Then he turned west on the pleasant rural road leading to the lake, and when he crested the hill he could see the two farms at which he had once been so happy and so well received. It pained him to think that these good people had later considered him to be a spy, but he supposed, upon reflection, that he had been, in a general way of speaking. He did not want to go on, but when the men behind began to rein up near him he sighed and headed for the rickety buildings of the De Groot farm. ‘Not much lost if they burn,’ a Welshman said.

  Sybilla was in the kitchen, and when she saw the troops she knew what to expect. Without saying a word, she packed a few belongings, reached for her sunbonnet, and appeared on the stoep. ‘General Kitchener’s orders,’ a soldier said. ‘Men, set the fires.’

  In a way the flames were merciful; they were erasing farm buildings that had long since served their day, and removing them was an act of good husbandry, but as the fire spread, Saltwood became aware of voices behind him, and turning, saw the four Van Doorn children: the girls Anna, Sannah and Johanna, and the handsome little boy Detlev.

  ‘Sir, sir! What are you doing?’ one of the girls screamed.

  At this moment Major Saltwood chanced to look down from his horse and catch the eye of the oldest girl, Johanna, twenty-one years old, and he saw in her such hatred that he almost shuddered, yet with this fierce animosity she was also studying him, as if she had seen him before. She did not seem to remember, for which he was grateful.

  ‘I suppose you’ll burn ours, too,’ she said through teeth that were almost clenched. ‘My father rides with the general.’

  ‘Be gentle with the old woman,’ Saltwood shouted at his men as Sybilla was placed in a wagon. ‘Gather the children.’ The three youngest were lifted up by soldiers and deposited beside her as the troop wheeled its horses and made its way to the Van Doorn farm—with Johanna walking grimly through the dust.

  This was no outmoded collection of shacks. It was one of the stoutest farms in eastern Transvaal, a place of stone buildings and excellent rondavels for its blacks. To burn this would be to destroy the heart of a rich agricultural district. ‘Burn it!’ Saltwood said, but before the torch could be applied to the wooden parts that would ignite, a woman appeared at the kitchen door.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she demanded.

  ‘Lord Kitchener’s orders, ma’am. You’re to get in the wagon.’

  ‘That I will not do,’ Sara van Doorn said, and when the Australians guarding the wagon relaxed their attention Johanna ran to join her mother. Together the two women blocked the entrance to the house.

  ‘Remove them!’ Saltwood commanded, and a detachment of Irish cavalrymen grabbed at the women, but they broke away and dashed into the house. When soldiers forced them out, the women carried in their arms the chief treasures of the Van Doorn family: Mevrou van Doorn held the brassbound Bible; Johanna, the ceramic pot in which her father made his bread pudding.

  A good fire was now burning in the shed, and one of the soldiers tried to snatch the book, intending to throw it in, but Mevrou van Doorn struggled to retain possession, and there was a scuffle until Saltwood saw what was happening. ‘Good God, man. That’s a Bible. Stand off.’ He was too late, however, to protect the pot that Johanna held, for a brutish soldier brought the butt of his gun around in a circle, caught the pot, and smashed it. When the dozen pieces tumbled to the boards of the stoep, it was apparent that a clever person with the right glue could reassemble the precious old thing, and Johanna stooped to gather some of the pieces, but this enraged the soldier, who brushed her aside and ground the remaining fragments under his boot.

  ‘Stand back, you fool!’ Saltwood cried, but as he did so he looked into the eyes of this embittered girl, and she remembered who he was: ‘Mother! He’s the spy.’

  From her wagon, Sybilla looked out to inspect the man in charge of this destruction, and she, too, recognized him: ‘The spy!’ The twin girls, peering from beneath the canvas, saw who he was and they joined the lamentation: ‘The spy! He’s Saltwood the spy.’

  When Frank dismounted to reassure the two Van Doorn women on the stoep, Johanna spat in his face: ‘They should have hanged you.’

  ‘They should have hanged you!’ the twins shouted, and Detlev, finding sticks in the wagon, started throwing them at their betrayer. Meanwhile, the fires raged.

  It was only thirty-eight miles from Vrymeer to the cluster of large lakes which the English called Chrissie Meer. Here the concentration camp had been established, but in that distance Major Saltwood’s column had collected five additional wagons filled with women and children from farms en route. Since all buildings had been burned, the women were sooty and weeping as they turned the last corner; then they looked with awe at their destination. Their camp lay at the edge of one of the loveliest lakes in Africa: a surface shimmering in sunlight, hills rising softly from the shore, flowers in beds, and a hint of animals hiding in the glens. Saltwood said to a member of the Welsh Fusiliers, ‘If you must have a prison camp … the clean air … the sunlight …’ In months ahead when the name of this camp echoed with shame, he would concede that it was at least a place of physical beauty. To it he delivered Sybilla de Groot, Sara van Doorn and the four Van Doorn children, but as he did so he noticed by sheerest accident a tent in which three young children lay sleeping, he thought; on closer inspection he saw that they were awake, too emaciated to respond when he spoke to them.

  Rushing to the commandant’s office, a doctor from the English Midlands, he cried, ‘Sir, those children in the tent at the bottom of Row Eighteen. Sir, those children are starving.’

  ‘There is no starvation here,’ the doctor said sternly, as if reporting on his hospital to a village committee of inspection.

  ‘But those children! Legs like matchsticks!’

  ‘We are all like matchsticks,’ the doctor cried, his voice suddenly rising almost to a scream, as if his earlier composure had been tenuous. ‘And do you know why?’ He uttered a string of obscenities Saltwood had not heard for years; they were not used at officers’ headquarters. ‘It’s your goddamned Lord Kitchener, that’s who it is. Go back and tell him what you saw.’

  ‘I can’t leave my women here …’

  ‘You’re right, Colonel … What’s your name?’

  ‘Saltwood, and I’m a major.’

  ‘English?’

  ‘I’m from the Cape. And I’d appreciate your telling me where to take these women.’

  ‘Where? Yes, where?�
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  ‘Doctor, lower your voice. You sound demented.’

  ‘I am demented!’ the little man screamed in a Lancashire dialect. ‘I am demented with shame.’

  With a sudden swipe of his right arm, Saltwood knocked the agitated man against a wall, then pulled him up and sat him at his desk. ‘Now tell me without bellowing—what’s the matter?’

  ‘Typhoid’s the matter. Measles are the matter. And dysentery, dysentery’s the matter.’ He broke down and sobbed so pitifully that Saltwood had to cover his own face in compassion.

  ‘Tell me in an orderly way,’ he said, touching the doctor’s shoulder. ‘I can see it’s horrible, but what can we do?’

  The doctor jabbed at his eyes, rumpled through some papers, found a report, and covered it with his hands for a moment. ‘We’re at the end of the supply line here, Colonel. Headquarters can’t send us enough food. But the diet would sustain life, except for the incessant illness.’ And here he repeated his litany of death: ‘Typhoid, measles, dysentery. We could fight any one, but a body already weakened by stringent diet, it hasn’t the strength. These figures tell our story.’ And he shoved the paper forward. ‘Deaths per thousand, months of February, March, seven hundred and eighty-three.’

  ‘My God!’ Saltwood cried.

  ‘Those were the bad months. Chrissie Meer’s average is usually less than three hundred.’

  ‘But even so, that’s one in three.’

  ‘Yes,’ the doctor said. ‘Of the thirty-seven women and children you delivered today, maybe fifteen, maybe twenty will be dead at the end of six months, if dysentery runs wild again, if the food supply weakens.’

  ‘Doctor, you are in very sore condition yourself. I think I should take you back to Pretoria.’

  A nurse heard this proposal and stepped forward, an extremely gaunt woman. ‘Dr. Higgins controls his feelings most of the time. We all try to. And when we get fresh vegetables or meat from the countryside, we keep many people alive. But without medicines …’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Dr. Higgins is a very strong man, spiritually. He does what he can.’

  ‘What do you need?’ Saltwood asked.

  She hesitated, looked at Dr. Higgins, and saw that she would get no help there. He had withdrawn from the discussion. ‘We need everything. Hospital beds. Medicines. We have no toilet paper. Dysentery runs wild, and children seem to starve, as you saw. If we don’t get help soon, and I mean nourishing food in better supply, all the children you brought us will be dead.’

  Two nights later, when he was back in Pretoria, he found that there were no additional supplies for Chrissie Meer, at the far end of the line: no extra food, no medicines, no sanitary aids, and he could see his children, the ones he had taken to the camp, dying. Retiring to his room, with dull anguish assailing him, he wrote a love letter:

  My dearest darling Maud,

  I have never before addressed a letter to you like this, because I did not appreciate how desperately I love you and how much I need you. I have been to Chrissie Meer, to the big concentration camp there, and I am shattered. You must do all you can to alleviate the condition of these pitiful people. Food, blankets, medicines, trained people. Maud, spend all our savings, volunteer yourself, but for God’s sake and the reputation of our people, you must do something. At this end I shall do whatever I can. An evil fog has fallen over this land, and if we do not dissipate it promptly, it will contaminate all future relationships between Englishman and Boer.

  When I rode back from Chrissie Meer, I reflected on the fact that the three men who were spoilers of this land, Shaka, Rhodes, Kitchener, not one of them had a wife. I fear that men without women are capable of terrible misdeeds, and I want to apologize to you for having allowed Mr. Rhodes to delay our marriage as he did. I was as evil as he in conforming to that hateful posture, and I bless you tonight for the humanity you have brought into my life.

  Your most loving husband,

  Frank

  When word circulated at headquarters that Maud Saltwood was creating disturbances—‘Not riots, you understand, but real annoyances, questions, and all that, you know’—Lord Kitchener was enraged. It infuriated him that one of his own men should be unable to control his wife, permitting her to make a fuss over the camps, where, as he pointed out again and again, ‘the women and children are much better off than they would be in their own homes.’

  ‘Bring Saltwood in here!’ he thundered. When the major stood before him he used his baton to indicate a pile of papers. ‘What’s all this—these reports—about your wife, Saltwood?’

  ‘She’s doing what she can to alleviate conditions—’

  ‘Alleviate? There’s nothing to alleviate.’

  ‘Sir, with all respect, have you seen the death rate—’

  ‘Damnit, sir, don’t you be insolent with me.’ The noble lord looked as if he could bite Saltwood in half, and would relish doing so. ‘You sit down there, and listen to someone who knows.’

  He summoned a Dr. Riddle, from London, who had just returned from a tour of the forty-odd camps. He was a cheery man, obviously well-fed, and seemed full of enthusiasm. With alacrity he took the report Lord Kitchener held out to him. ‘I wrote this, you understand, Saltwood. Done on the spot.’ From it he read his major conclusions:

  ‘The Boer women and children are noticeably better off than they would be if left on their abandoned farms. They receive adequate supplies of the most healthful foods, on which they seem to prosper and if—’

  ‘Did you get out to Chrissie Meer?’ Saltwood interrupted. ‘Listen to the report,’ Kitchener snapped. ‘I wasn’t able to get that far east,’ Dr. Riddle said.

  ‘Whatever illness appears in the camps is due primarily to the Boer women themselves. Having been raised on farms without privies, they cannot learn to adopt the sanitary measures which alone prevent the spread of epidemics. And when illness does strike, they insist upon resorting to country measures that have not been used in civilized nations for the past sixty years. They wrap a measled child in the skin of a freshly slaughtered goat. They grub in the countryside for old herbs which they claim can reduce fever. They recite rhymes as if they were witch doctors. And they will not wash their hands.’

  ‘I am seriously thinking of bringing criminal charges against some of these mothers,’ Kitchener said with great irritation. ‘They should be tried for murder. It’s all their fault, you know.’

  ‘So I must conclude that the English authorities are doing everything humanly possible to protect the women and children in our charge. I found them in good condition, reasonably happy, and with every probability of leaving the camps in better condition than when they entered.’

  ‘What would your precious wife make of that?’ Lord Kitchener asked, fastening his hard eyes on Saltwood.

  Saltwood, having once denied his wife in the presence of a strong man, had no intention of doing so again: ‘I think, sir, she would say that such a report does both you and the king an injustice.’

  An explosion without specific words erupted, after which Kitchener roared, ‘Are you impugning the integrity of Dr. Riddle?’

  Taking a deep breath, Saltwood replied, ‘I am saying that his report does not begin to cover conditions at Chrissie Meer, and, I suspect, at a lot of other installations I haven’t seen.’

  ‘But your wife has seen them?’

  ‘Sir, the day may come when you will be eternally grateful that my wife spoke out in these bad days.’

  ‘Bad days, damn you! We’re winning along the entire front.’

  ‘Not in the camps, sir. You run great risk of damaging your reputation because of what’s happening—’

  ‘Show him, Riddle,’ Kitchener said. ‘Show him the other page.’

  ‘I’ll read it,’ the ebullient doctor said, not wishing this secret part of his report to fall into other hands, even temporarily:

  ‘The complaint of the Boers that their women and children are dying at an excessive rate is belied by the statistics of our own forc
es. To date 19,381 such Boers have died in the camps, but it must be remembered that in the same period 15,849 of our soldiers have died under similar circumstances. It is not our barbarity that kills, nor starvation on the diet we provide; it is the physical nature of the camps and the hospitals, the incessant spread of dysentery and typhoid, and these strike Boer and Englishman even-handedly.’

  ‘And what do you think of that?’ Kitchener snapped, but Frank was too ashamed of the mendacity of this report to say what he thought: The English soldiers went into their hospitals wounded or already near death from disease. Most Boer women and children went in healthy. Both died, and at equal rates, but from much different causes.

  ‘Well?’ Kitchener asked. ‘They’re equal, aren’t they?’

  ‘In war, unarmed women and children do not equal men in uniform.’

  ‘Get out of here! You’re dismissed from my headquarters. I will not have a man around me who cannot control his own wife.’ When Saltwood remained at attention, Kitchener repeated, ‘Get out. You’re dismissed with prejudice. You can never again serve with an English unit. You are unreliable, sir, and a disgrace to your uniform.’

  In a calm such as he had not known since he began serving under General Buller, Frank Saltwood looked down at Lord Kitchener at his desk, arranging reports which proved that England was winning the war. ‘Permission to speak, sir?’

  ‘Granted—then begone.’

  ‘If you pursue the war along these lines, you’ll be remembered as the general who lost the peace.’ With that he saluted, marched from the room, and headed for the Johannesburg railway. At Cape Town, hungry for the civilizing spirit of his wife, he burst into their quarters to find her gone. The maid said, ‘She’s out to inspect the camps, Mr. Saltwood.’ When the girl left, he bowed his head and mumbled, ‘Thank you, God, for showing at least one of us his duty. I mean her duty.’ In the morning he would find where she was working, and join her.

  When Sybilla de Groot and the Van Doorns were deposited at their concentration camp, they were assigned to a small bell tent that already contained a family of four, the two youngest of whom were near death. Sybilla, white-haired and somewhat stooped, came into the tent, saw what needed to be done, and said quietly to the Van Doorns, ‘We can make do.’

 

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