by Fred Khumalo
There was a momentary silence from the ranks. Then someone started chanting De la Rey’s name. The rest of his comrades joined in.
As the Boers went about raiding the enemy’s wagons, the chant resounded across the veld: ‘De la Rey! De la Rey! De la Rey!’
Until he got drafted into the commando, De la Rey hadn’t realised what a noble surname he had. General de Wet’s allusion to the importance of his name had left him confused. The issue resurfaced when the commandos were sitting around a fire one day, eating the provisions they had inherited from the vanquished British in Kroonstad. One soldier said absent-mindedly, ‘Ah, if General de la Rey were here, the Englishman would be shitting in his pants.’
‘But we have Cornelius in our midst,’ someone said. ‘He should start leading us one of these days. He is a De la Rey, after all.’
‘Yes, the De la Reys were born to lead.’
‘Lead us, De la Rey!’
The soldiers broke into song about De la Rey’s valour. Cornelius’ face reddened at this. What made him most uncomfortable was that he did not know who this De la Rey was. He soon regained his composure, as he didn’t want to betray his ignorance. He put out his questions carefully, tactfully, as one would lay traps for unsuspecting prey to find out more about the supposedly great man. Without realising it, his fellow soldiers taught him that there once lived in these parts of the country a brave soldier by the name of General Jacobus Herculaas de la Rey. Or, as he was famously known, Koos de la Rey, the Lion of the West. General de la Rey was one of the leading figures of the struggle for Boer independence from British oppression. A veteran of many battles; against the Basotho in 1865, against the baPedi, led by King Sekhukhune, in 1876.
Cornelius, who kept in his pocket a small book in which he drew pictures of people, would sometimes sit down, close his eyes and conjure up the face of General de la Rey, based on the rough descriptions handed down to him by the various raconteurs. Then he would painstakingly draw the figure of the general with an exaggerated moustache and strong facial features. He never forgot to include a rifle and a bandolier in all the pictures that he drew of General de la Rey. The drawings proved popular – in fact, so popular that some of the men offered Cornelius portions of their meals in exchange for drawings of themselves. These he rendered on pieces of paper brought to him by customers who wanted their portrait drawn. Many of his models were easy-going fellows who accepted the artist’s interpretation of themselves. Others would moan, ‘Why did you make me look sour-faced like an Englishman? Where are my lips? All I see here is a thin, mean line where my lips are supposed to be.’
‘Surely I don’t have a nose as flat as a kaffir’s?’
‘Everyone all over the Free State knows my beard is bigger than Paul Kruger’s. So, why give me a half-hearted beard? I’m not paying for this.’
One afternoon he quietly offered to draw a picture of the veldkornet’s wife. The military officer, a tall, scrawny man with startled eyes and a fierce moustache, responded in his quarrelsome voice, ‘How could you possibly draw a picture of my lovely wife, seeing you’ve never laid your eyes on her?’
‘Sir, just describe Mrs Breytenbach for me. Tell me in detail what she looks like. And I shall render her beautiful face – I am guessing she’s beautiful – on my piece of paper. Let me try, please, sir.’
Haltingly at first, Breytenbach started describing his wife’s facial features. As he warmed up to the process, shimmering nuggets of description spouted from his mouth. And at long last, like someone coming to rest after a spirited sprint, he exhaled deeply, threw back his head and looked up at the sky.
Later, a beatific smile spread over the veldkornet’s face as he leaned over De la Rey’s shoulder to admire the magical feat the young man was performing with his pen and paper.
When the drawing was complete, Breytenbach showed it around. The men beamed at the image. After he’d left the circle of men drinking coffee, two soldiers who had actually met the veldkornet’s wife in the past wondered aloud who had the more vivid imagination: the commander himself or De la Rey. The beautiful angel in that picture would run for cover if she were to meet the real Mrs Breytenbach.
For the next few weeks, De la Rey was the veldkornet’s favourite. The older man shared his private bottle of brandy with him. He gave him generous cuts of biltong from his own knapsack. He waxed lyrical about the days he started courting Mrs Breytenbach. The beautiful drawing of Mrs Breytenbach inspired other men to make special requests. They asked De la Rey to draw pictures of their children, girlfriends, wives, favourite horses. In turn they rewarded him with their own share of food or drink. This activity offered De la Rey respite from the burden of being a De la Rey.
But De la Rey knew that the novelty of his drawings would soon wear off. The men would again remember that they were sitting with a somewhat reluctant warrior in their midst. For his part, De la Rey was spending sleepless nights trying to come up with a plan to make his comrades realise that he was not about to be leader of the commando, as they seemed to be suggesting. When he broached the subject one night, the soldiers shook their heads and said, ‘Ag, shame, he is as modest as the General himself. Look at that beard. Look at those locks of hair. Look at those arms, those muscles, those sledgehammer hands, those sausage fingers.’ And they broke into song, in praise of General de la Rey. Cornelius de la Rey sighed in despair.
By this time, the commandos, emboldened by their success in Kroonstad and Sanna’s Post, had moved bravely southwards to meet the approaching Brits. Along the way, they could see the damage that the enemies had wrought. Some homesteads were still smouldering from British torches. At one stage they passed a village and noticed a group of men – clearly burghers by their dress – digging a trench. De la Rey thought it did not make sense, digging in the middle of the bush. What could they be planting? Then he noticed a mound of corpses nearby. The sweet-sour miasma of rotting flesh hit his nostrils and he recoiled, holding in his breath. His quick farmer’s eye reckoned that the mound was perhaps ten metres by eight metres, the bodies piled four or five high.
De la Rey looked away from the corpses, towards the men who were digging what he realised was a mass grave. Arms rippling with muscles, bodies glistening with sweat, the men plunged their shovels into the soft, yielding earth. They moved like ghosts, mechanically, soundlessly, in the sweltering heat. There was something mournful, something ritualised about their movement. The loud buzzing of green flies muffled the rasp of shovels eating into the ground. Still holding his breath, De la Rey tried not to glance at the corpses, to look stoically ahead. But his eyes strayed and lit upon a tiny head. She could have been ten or eleven, with a heart-shaped face – now chalky and pale – her eyes staring pleadingly into space, her raven hair peeking out from beneath her off-white bonnet. De la Rey vomited and more men followed suit. Involuntarily, De la Rey’s gaze returned to the child’s face. He saw that she was resting on the chest of a black woman whose hair and cap looked to have been singed by fire.
Some soldiers walked towards the man who seemed to be in charge to find out what had happened to these Boer women and children and their servants. De la Rey recalled having seen one or two smouldering remains of farmhouses on the way and, like his brothers-in-arms, he wanted to know what was going on. But the veldkornet would have none of it. Before De la Rey’s comrades could find out what had happened, Breytenbach gave the order for the men to move on, move on. They continued on their journey south. Their shock turned to anger. Their anger metamorphosed into impatience. They had to get the Brits.
A few days later, still in early April, they hit the Brits for the third time – this time at Reddersburg, about thirty-five miles south of Bloemfontein. Again, when the fighting started, De la Rey found himself inhabiting the body of a person he did not recognise, as he had when he’d killed the three British prisoners. He shouted as he poured bullets at the enemy.
At the end of the skirmish, five hundred and ninety rednecks lay dead. When De la Rey em
erged from his trance, he looked at his hands and the corpses, and shivered. But when he remembered how scared he had been just before he started firing away, he smiled. It was with pride that he saw the arrogant British who had survived the slaughter handing themselves over. He wanted to cheer as they were driven at gunpoint to a farm controlled by the Boers.
With the British prisoners safely confined behind barbed wire, the victorious Boers broke into song as they invaded the provisioning wagons of the enemy. The leaders of the campaign had to remind the men that it was too early for them to become complacent. While De Wet’s troops were making a few dents in the armour of the Brits, who were marching northwards and leaving a trail of destruction in their wake, the fact was that the Brits still had the upper hand in the republic of the Free State. The British scorched earth strategy – where they burned down properties belonging to burghers like De la Rey – intensified. Women, children and the elderly were being consigned to concentration camps.
The images of the dead men he had seen in the past three battles still loomed large in De la Rey’s mind, as well as the picture of those men digging the mass grave. And the image of the little Boer girl’s frozen, chalky face.
Haunted by what he had seen and his own part in the bloodshed, De la Rey began to think about the possibility of desertion.
The indignation against the British oppressors was the glue that kept De la Rey and his countrymen together, the potent pot of mampoer that they all drank from. It was what they had in common. Otherwise, the Boers had a mixed and varied ancestry. They descended mainly from the Dutch, but there was French Huguenot blood too, and some German and Italian. Some even had genes that bowed to the gods of the Khoisan or Bushman. Some had the blood of Malay slaves, which is why some had the lips, nose and buttocks of the black African that they so reviled. But now they were Afrikaners. Europeans in Africa. The white tribe of Africa rebelling against British colonialism and injustice.
De la Rey was becoming increasingly despondent and afraid the others would notice it. As the days went on, he realised that his mood was beginning to affect his comrades, yet his desperation continued to grow. Finally, he decided that he could no longer undermine the morale of his fellow countrymen: the only way out of this was to desert.
An opportunity offered itself one day when his company put up camp alongside a muddy stream a few days after their encounter with the Brits at Reddersburg. While his comrades slept, De la Rey crept away, grabbed a horse and fled. He rode in what he presumed to be the east, the general direction of Basutoland. At daybreak he found a clump of trees with a clearing in the middle, where he slept fitfully for the rest of the day, while his horse grazed nearby. He couldn’t believe how much his life had changed almost overnight. From an innocent burgher whose experience of shedding blood had been limited to killing rabbits and antelope, he had become fluent in the language of violence. He had butchered men who, individually, had not done anything wrong to him. And now, he had deserted, although he knew that desertion was punishable by death.
When night fell, he resumed his journey. Even though it was dark, he rode carefully in wooded territory, avoiding open spaces.
He was armed with his Krupp and his hessian bag with his prized possessions, which included a flask of mampoer, some food, a water bottle, tobacco, his sketchbook and some loose pieces of blank paper.
At daybreak, he hid in the bush again. He must have finally fallen asleep because when he next blinked his eyes, night had fallen. Time to move on. He got up stiffly and went to where he had left his horse. It was lying on its side, dead. He checked it for injuries. There were none, but foam pooled around its mouth. It must have died of sheer exhaustion. He’d ridden the poor thing to death. De la Rey collapsed next to it, sobbing. In between his bitter sobs, he spoke to the horse, apologising to it, begging it to get up even though he knew it couldn’t. Stroking it, singing to it, telling it stories, weeping, until – his strength and resolve gone – he fell asleep next to it.
CHAPTER 5
The next thing he knew, De la Rey was being carried. Slowly, his mind began to clear. He could hear voices. His eyes opened gradually. Then he jolted, immediately remembering he was a soldier. The Brits must have caught up with him as he slept.
‘Los my! Los my, jou moerskont rooinek!’ De la Rey cried in his mother tongue for his tormentors to let him go.
To his surprise and mild disappointment, the Brits had not tied his hands together. Didn’t they know he was a De la Rey? A clan made famous by the Lion of the West, whose name was spoken with reverence all over the land? Why hadn’t they tied his hands together when they’d captured him?
‘Ah, he is awake,’ one of the voices said in Sesotho. De la Rey frowned, recognising the native language. So, these were no Brits, after all. Maybe Sesotho-speaking spies working for the Brits? De la Rey suspected the Brits were getting everyone to do their dirty work for them.
‘Put him down,’ said another voice. ‘Let him be, let’s hear him talk.’
He looked about him. One of his captors was pointing a gun at him; his own gun, the beloved Krupp which had served him so well in the past. One of the men was carrying his bag of provisions too.
‘Who are you?’ he said in his rusty Sesotho. ‘Why are you selling me out to the Brits? I thought we were all in this together, the natives and the Boers against the Brits.’
They laughed at him.
Someone mimicked him, ‘We’re all in this together, the natives and the Boers against the Brits. Did you hear him, my dear brothers? Since when are Boers calling us natives? Don’t you usually call us kaffirs, heathens?’
The group of men were armed with spears and knobkerries. The leader motioned for one of the men to lead the way. They started walking.
The leader said, ‘Morena, we pray and hope you don’t try running away. Because if you do, you’ll leave us no option but to shoot you. With your own gun.’
De la Rey swallowed audibly.
Tucked away at the foot of a mountain, the small village that they reached was one of the few that had escaped the attention of the British. Many other villages had been torched by the British, and the inhabitants rounded up and sent to concentration camps, their livestock impounded by the insatiable British army.
When they got to the village – a collection of grass-and-mud huts – the leader ordered some young girls to prepare drinking water, food and a bed for the stranger. The leader kept De la Rey’s belongings. Two men were assigned to stand guard at the entrance to his hut at all times. De la Rey was left to rest for the night.
The following day, he was called to some kind of square where he sat facing the men of the village. The interrogation began, lead by the chief.
‘I am Motaung, leader of the Bataung people of this village. As I said to you yesterday, we know there is a war going on. We are not in the least interested in the fight. But we know that poor people like us, who have nothing to do with the fighting, are being punished by both sides. As they say, when two elephants fight, the grass suffers. I believe my own children, who were out there working for the white man, have been eaten by this war that we cannot make sense of. They are somewhere inside a concentration camp. If they are still alive. Now, we do not want any problems with the white man. With either the Boers or the British. You can see, I am an old man whose dying wish is to see this village remain untouched by this white madness. Are you still with me, Morena?’
‘Yes.’
‘Now, because it is not our intention to have trouble with either of the warring sides, we have to ask you some questions. We expect you to be as truthful as you can be. Do you understand?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘Who are you?’
‘Cornelius de la Rey …’
‘De la Rey? De la Rey?’ the men asked in unison, turning to each other.
Leader Motaung raised his hand to silence the men and continued questioning his captive. ‘Are you related to the famous General de la Rey?’
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p; De la Rey smiled. ‘I’ve never met the man, but I know of him. You could say we are related, seeing we’re all Boere …’
‘So why are you here? You should be there in the war.’
De la Rey sighed. ‘I think I’ve exhausted all the commitment that I had to the war effort—’
‘I am disappointed!’ cried one man. ‘You’re a born fighter, a war machine, look at you. And you run away from the fight like a dog with its tail between its legs.’
‘And you have in your possession such a big gun,’ shouted another man.
‘Hold it! Hold it!’ Ntate Motaung said, raising his hand to restore order. He spoke harshly. ‘We are not children here. Nor are we women. If you have something to say to this man, say it through me. Respect the rest of the men gathered here.’
The two men who had transgressed got up with their heads bowed. ‘Oh, you Great Lion! You who grew up when we were but spittle in our fathers’ mouths, do forgive us our transgression.’
Ntate Motaung motioned them to sit down. He turned to De la Rey. ‘What else do you have to say for yourself?’
‘One thing I can say for myself is this: I am not a traitor. I will never turn myself over to the rednecks.’ He spat on the ground. ‘That man Milner has spilled enough of my people’s blood. Someone must stop him. But what I know is that I am not the one to stop him. I am not a fighter.’
‘We are not questioning your commitment to your people’s cause. All we want to establish is: are you truly who you say you are? Do you not harbour any other nefarious plans that might jeopardise this community?’