Power of the Sword

by Wilbur Smith

  Manie’s opponent was Laurie King, an experienced light-heavy with good hands and a concrete jaw who had never been put down in forty amateur bouts. Almost nobody had ever heard of Manfred De La Rey, and those few who had now discounted his single victory as a lucky punch on an opponent who wasn’t taking it seriously anyway.

  Laurie King, however, had heard the story and he was taking it very seriously indeed. He kept off for most of the first round until the crowd started to boo with impatience. However, he had now studied Manfred and decided that, although he moved well, he wasn’t as dangerous as he had been warned and that he could be taken with a left to the head. He went in to test this theory. The last thing he remembered was a pair of ferocious yellow eyes, burning like a Kalahari sun at midday into his face, and then the harsh canvas grazing the skin from his cheek as he slammed head first into the boards of the ring. He never remembered seeing the punch. Although the gong rang before he was counted out, Laurie King could not come out for the second round; his head was still rolling like a drunkard’s. He had to be supported by his seconds back to the dressing-room.

  In the front row Uncle Tromp roared like a wounded bull buffalo while beside him Sarah shrieked herself hoarse as tears of joy and excitement wet her lashes and shone upon her cheeks.

  The next morning the boxing correspondent of the Afrikaans newspaper Die Burger, ‘The Citizen’, dubbed Manfred ‘The Lion of the Kalahari’ and mentioned that he was not only the great nephew of General Jacobus Hercules De La Rey, hero of the Volk, but also related to the Reverend Tromp Bierman, boxing champion, author, and the new dominie of Stellenbosch.

  Roelf Stander and the entire boxing squad were waiting in the quadrangle when Manfred came out of his sociology lecture and they surrounded him.

  ‘You’ve been holding out on us, Manie,’ Roelf accused furiously. ‘You never told us that your uncle is the Tromp Bierman. Sweet mercy, man, he was national champion for five years. He knocked out both Slater and Black Jephta!’

  ‘Didn’t I tell you?’ Manie frowned thoughtfully. ‘It must have slipped my mind.’

  ‘Manie, you have to introduce us,’ the vice-captain pleaded. ‘We all want to meet him, please, man, please.’

  ‘Do you think he would coach the team, Manie? Won’t you ask him. Hell, if we had Tromp Bierman as coach—’ Roelf broke off, awed into silence by the thought.

  ‘I tell you what,’ Manie suggested. ‘If you can get the whole boxing team to church on Sunday morning, I’m sure that my Aunt Trudi will invite us all to Sunday lunch. I tell you, gentlemen, you don’t know what heaven is until you have tasted my Aunt Trudi’s koek-sisters.’

  So scrubbed and shaven and Brylcreemed and buttoned into their Sunday-best suits, the university boxing squad took up a full pew of the church, and their responses and rendition of the hymns shook the roof timbers.

  Aunt Trudi looked upon the occasion as a challenge to her culinary skills and she and the girls took all week to prepare the dinner. The guests, all lusty young men in peak physical condition, had existed on university fare for weeks, and they gazed in ravenous disbelief upon the banquet, trying valiantly to divide their attention between Uncle Tromp, who was in top form at the head of the long table recounting his most memorable fights, the tittering blushing daughters of the house who waited upon them and the groaning board piled with roasts and preserves and puddings.

  At the end of the meal Roelf Stander, bloated like a python which had swallowed a gazelle, rose to make a speech of thanks on behalf of the team, and halfway through changed it into an impassioned plea to Uncle Tromp to accept the duties of honorary coach.

  Uncle Tromp waved away the request with a jovial chortle as though it were totally unthinkable, but the entire team, including Manie, added their entreaties, whereupon he made a series of excuses, each one lamer than the preceding one, all of which were vociferously rebutted by the team in unison, until finally, with a heavy sigh of resignation and forbearance, he capitulated. Then while accepting their fervent gratitude and hearty handshakes, he at last broke down and beamed with unrestrained pleasure.

  ‘I tell you, boys, you don’t know what you’ve let yourselves in for. There are many words I don’t understand at all. “I’m tired” and “I’ve had enough” are just some of them,’ he warned.

  After the evening service, Manie and Roelf walked back under the dark rustling oaks to Rust en Vrede and Roelf was uncharacteristically silent, not speaking until they had reached the main gates. Then his tone was reflective:

  ‘Tell me, Manie, your cousin – how old is she?’

  ‘Which one?’ Manie asked without interest. ‘The fat one is Gertrude and the one with pimples is Renata—’

  ‘No! No, Manie, don’t be a dog!’ Roelf cut him short. ‘The pretty one with blue eyes, the one with the silky gold hair. The one I’m going to marry.’

  Manfred stopped dead and swung to face him, his head going down on his shoulders, his mouth twisting into a snarl.

  ‘Never say that again!’ His voice shook and he seized the front of Roelf’s jacket. ‘Don’t ever talk dirty like that again. I warn you, you talk about Sarah like that again, and I’ll kill you.’

  Manfred’s face was only inches from Roelf’s. That terrible yellow glow, the killing rage, was in his eyes.

  ‘Hey, Manie,’ Roelf whispered hoarsely. ‘What’s wrong with you? I didn’t say anything dirty. Are you mad? I would never insult Sarah.’

  The yellow rage faded slowly from Manfred’s eyes and he released his grip on Roelf’s lapels. He shook his head as if to clear it, and his voice was bemused when he spoke again. ‘She’s only a baby. You shouldn’t talk like that, man. She’s only a little girl.’

  ‘A baby?’ Roelf chuckled uncertainly and straightened his jacket. ‘Are you blind, Manie. She’s not a baby. She is the most lovely—’ but Manfred flung away angrily and went storming through the gates into the house.

  ‘So, my friend,’ Roelf whispered, ‘that’s how it is!’ He sighed and thrust his hands deeply into his pockets. And then he remembered how Sarah had looked at Manfred during the meal and how he had seen her lay her hand on the back of his neck, furtively and adoringly, as she leaned over him to take his empty plate, and he sighed again, overcome suddenly with a brooding sense of melancholy. ‘There are a thousand pretty girls out there,’ he told himself with an attempt to throw off the dark mood. ‘All of them panting for Roelf Stander—’ and he shrugged and grinned lopsidedly and followed Manie into the house.

  Manfred won his next twelve matches in an unbroken succession, all of them by knock-out, all of them within three rounds; and all the sports writers had by now adopted the name ‘Lion of the Kalahari’ in describing his feats.

  ‘All right, Jong, win them while you can,’ Uncle Tromp admonished him. ‘But just remember you aren’t going to be young always, and in the long run it’s not a man’s muscles and fists that keep him on top. It’s what’s in his skull, Jong, and don’t you ever forget it!’ So Manfred threw himself as enthusiastically into his academic studies as he had into his training routine.

  German was by now almost as natural to him as Afrikaans, and he was considerably more fluent in it than in English, which he spoke only reluctantly and with a heavy accent. He found the Roman Dutch Law satisfying in its logic and philosophy and read the Institutes of Justinian like literature; at the same time politics and sociology both fascinated him. He and Roelf debated and discussed them endlessly, cementing their own friendship in the process.

  His boxing prowess had made him an instant celebrity on the Stellenbosch campus. Some of his professors treated him with special favour and condescension because of this, while others were at first deliberately antagonistic, acting as though he were a dunce until he proved that he was not.

  ‘Perhaps our well-known pugilist will give us the benefit of his towering intellect and throw some light on the concept of National Bolshevism for us.’ The speaker was the professor of Sociology and Politics, a
tall austere intellectual with the piercing eyes of a mystic. Though he had been born in Holland his parents had brought him out to Africa at an early age, and Dr Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd was now one of the leading Afrikaans intellectuals and a champion of his people’s nationalist aspirations. He lectured first-year political students only once a semester, reserving most of his efforts for his faculty’s honour students. Now he was smiling superciliously as Manfred rose slowly to his feet and composed his thoughts.

  Dr Verwoerd waited for a few seconds and was about to wave him down again, the fellow was clearly a clod, when Manfred began his reply, speaking with carefully couched grammatical exactitude and in his newly acquired Stellenbosch accent which Roelf was helping him hone – the ‘Oxford’ accent of Afrikaans.

  ‘As opposed to the revolutionary ideology of conventional Bolshevism created under Lenin’s leadership, National Bolshevism was originally a term used in Germany to describe a policy of resistance to the Treaty of Versailles—’ and Dr Verwoerd blinked and stopped smiling. The fellow had seen the trap from a mile off, separating the two concepts immediately.

  ‘Can you tell us who was the innovator of the concept?’ Dr Verwoerd demanded, a prickle of exasperation in his usual cool tones.

  ‘I believe the idea was first put forward in 1919 by Karl Radek. His forum was an alliance of the pariah powers against the common Western enemies of Britain, France and the United States.’

  The professor leaned forward like a falcon bating for its prey. ‘In your view, sir, does it, or a similar doctrine, have any currency in the present politics of southern Africa?’ They devoted all their attention to each other for the rest of the session, while Manfred’s peers, relieved of all necessity to think, listened with varying degrees of mystification or boredom.

  The following Saturday night, when Manfred won the university light heavyweight title in the packed gymnasium, Dr Verwoerd was sitting in the second row. It was the first time that he had been seen at any of the university’s athletic tournaments, apart, of course, from the rugby football matches which no Afrikaner worthy of the name would have missed.

  A few days later the professor sent for Manfred, ostensibly to discuss an essay that he had submitted on the history of liberalism, but their discussion ran for well over an hour and ranged widely. When it ended Dr Verwoerd stopped Manfred at the door. ‘Here is a book that you might not have had an opportunity to look at.’ He handed it across the desk. ‘Keep it as long as you need, and let me know your views when you have finished with it.’

  Manfred was in a hurry to get to his next lecture so he did not even read the title, and when he got back to his room he tossed it on his desk. Roelf was waiting to join him on their evening run and he had no chance to look at the book again until he had changed into his pyjamas late that night.

  He picked it up from the desk and saw that he had already heard of it, and that it was in the original German. He did not put it down again until dawn was glimmering through the chinks in his curtains and the rock pigeons were cooing on the ledge outside his window. Then he closed the book and re-read the title: Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler.

  He passed the rest of the day in a trance of almost religious revelation and hurried back to his room at lunchtime to read again. The author was speaking directly to him, addressing his German and Aryan bloodlines. He had the weird sensation that it had been written exclusively for him. Why else would Herr Hitler have included such marvellous passages as:

  It is considered as natural and honourable that a young man should learn to fence and proceed to fight duels right and left, but if he boxes, it is supposed to be vulgar! Why? There is no sport that so much as this one promotes the spirit of attack, demanding lightning decisions, and trains the body in steel dexterity . . . but above all the young healthy body must also learn to suffer blows – it is not the function of the Völkisch state to breed a colony of peaceful aesthetes and physical degenerates . . . If our entire intellectual upper class had not been brought up so exclusively on upper-class etiquette; if instead they had learned boxing thoroughly, a German revolution of pimps, deserters and suchlike rabble would never have been possible . . .

  Manfred shivered with a sense of foreknowledge when he saw his own hardly formulated attitudes to personal morality so clearly explained.

  Parallel to the training of the body, a struggle against the poisoning of the soul must begin. Our whole public life today is a hot-house for sexual ideas and stimulations . . .

  Manfred had himself suffered from these torments set like snares for the young and pure. He had been forced to struggle against the evil lustful clamour of his own body when he had been exposed to magazine and cinema posters – always written in English, that effete degenerate language which he was growing to hate – depicting half-naked females.

  ‘You are right,’ he muttered, turning the pages furiously. ‘You are laying out the great truths for all of mankind. We must be pure and strong.’

  Then his heart bounded as he saw set out in unequivocal language the other truths that he had only before heard lightly hinted at. He was transported back across the years to the hobo camp beside the railway tracks outside Windhoek, and saw again the tattered newspaper cartoon of Hoggenheimer driving the Volk into slavery. His outrage was consuming and he trembled with anger when he read:

  With satanic joy in his face, the black-haired Jewish youth lurks in wait for the unsuspecting girl whom he defiles with his blood, stealing her from her people.

  In his imagination he saw Sarah’s sweet pale body lying spreadeagled under the gross hairy carcass of Hoggenheimer and he was ready to kill.

  Then the author lanced a vein of his Afrikaner blood so skilfully that Manfred’s soul seemed almost to bleed upon the page.

  It was and is the Jews who bring the negroes into the Rhineland, always with the same secret thought and clear aim of ruining the hated white race by the necessarily resulting bastardization . . .

  He shuddered. ‘Swartgevaar! Black danger!’ had been the rallying cry of his people over the centuries they had been in Africa, and his atavistic heart beat to that summons once again.

  He finished the book shaken and exhausted as he had never been in the boxing ring. Although it was already late he went to find the man who had loaned it to him, and they talked eagerly and seriously until after midnight.

  The next day the professor dropped an approving word to another in a high place: ‘I have found one who I believe will be a valuable recruit, one with a good receptive mind who will soon have great influence and standing amongst our young people.’

  Manfred’s name was laid before the high council of a secret society at its next conclave:

  ‘One of our best young men at the university, the senior student of Rust en Vrede is close to him—’

  ‘Have him recruited,’ ordered the chairman of the council.

  Five days a week Roelf and Manfred ran a training route through the mountains together, a hard route of steep gradients and rough footing. Five miles out they stopped to drink in the pool below a feathery white waterfall. Roelf watched Manfred kneel on the slippery wet rocks and scoop up a double handful of the clear cold water to pour it into his open mouth.

  ‘He is a good choice,’ he agreed silently with the decision of his superiors. The light vest and shorts that Manfred wore showed off his powerful but graceful body, and his lustrous coppery hair and fine features were compelling. But it was the golden topaz eyes that were the key to his personality. Even Roelf felt overshadowed by the younger man’s developing confidence and assurance.

  ‘He will be a strong leader, the type we need so desperately.’

  Manfred sprang to his feet again, dashing the water from his mouth with his forearm.

  ‘Come on, drag arse,’ he laughed. ‘Last one back home is a Bolshevik.’

  But Roelf stopped him. ‘Today I want to talk to you,’ he admitted, and Manfred frowned.

  ‘Hell, man, we do nothing but talk anyway. Why here?
’

  ‘Because here no one will overhear us. And you are wrong, Manie, some of us are doing more than just talking. We are preparing for action, hard fighting action, the kind of action you love so well.’

  Manfred turned back towards him, immediately intrigued, and came to squat in front of him. ‘Who? What action?’ he demanded, and Roelf inclined his head.

  ‘A secret élite of dedicated Afrikaners, the leaders of our people, men in top places, in government and education and the commercial life of the nation. That’s who, Manie. And not only the leaders of today, Manie, the leaders of tomorrow also. Men like you and me, Manie – that’s who.’

  ‘A secret society?’ Manfred swayed back on his heels.

  ‘No, Manie, much more than that, a secret army ready to fight for our poor downtrodden people. Ready to die to restore our nation to greatness.’

  Manfred felt the fine hairs on his arms and at the nape of his neck come erect as the thrill of it coursed through his veins. His response was immediate and unquestioning.

  ‘Soldiers, Manie, the storm-troopers of our nation,’ Roelf went on.

  ‘Are you one of them, Roelf?’ Manie demanded.

  ‘Yes, Manie, I am one of them, and you also. You have attracted the attention of our supreme council. I have been asked to invite you to join us in our march to destiny, in our struggle to fulfil the manifest destiny of our people.’

  ‘Who are our leaders? What is the name of this secret army?’

  ‘You will know. You will be told everything after you have taken the oath of allegiance,’ Roelf promised him, and reached out to seize his arm, pressing powerful fingers into Manie’s thick rubber-hard biceps.

  ‘Do you accept the call of duty?’ he asked. ‘Will you join us, Manfred De La Rey? Will you wear our uniform and fight in our ranks?’