The Covenant (123 page)

On the morning of October 7 word reached Venloo that their commando was to depart immediately for the Natal border, but not to cross it until formal commencement of hostilities: “You can stand with the forefeet of your ponies touching enemy territory.” So the Venloo Commando formed up, and rode south.

This commando consisted of two hundred and sixty-nine Boers, each mounted on a sturdy pony which he supplied. Since each man dressed in whatever clothes he deemed appropriate for an extended stay in the field, the file looked more like a rabble than an army company. Some men wore heavy brown corduroys, some black, a few white. Most wore vests, unbuttoned, and about half had heavy coats
of a wild variety. They wore veldskoen, heavy homemade field shoes of softened leather. The only item of clothing or equipment in which there was the slightest standardization was the hat: most of the men preferred the slouching Boer hat, which made them look like disgruntled sheepdogs. But even hats weren’t uniform, for some men chose bowlers, tweed caps or almost any other available headgear. Behind them came some forty blacks, all mounted, leading twenty or thirty spare ponies.

What made the Venloo Commando unforgettable were the units front and rear. Ahead of his troops rode General Paulus de Groot, sixty-seven years old, big, hefty in chest and belly, bearded, wearing the uniform that had distinguished him at Majuba: a formal frock coat with silver buttons and a tall black top hat. The side of this hat was decorated with a small republican flag embroidered by Sybilla with the words:
VIR GOD
!
VIR LAND
!
VIR JUSTISIE
! His official rank was Commandant, but no one addressed him as anything but General.

At the rear, behind the blacks and the remounts, came the wagons containing the sixteen wives who would accompany their men to the front. Undisputed leader among them was Sybilla de Groot, sixty-four years old, who said, “I must go with my man in his war against that woman across the sea.”

This was typical of the Boer army, little disciplined, less organized, paid not at all, but well able to live off the land it fought for, with a Mauser and six legs for each man, because everyone was mounted. Its task: to defeat the combined armies of the British Empire.

Ostensible blame for launching the Anglo-Boer War of 1899 was visible for all the world to see. At five o’clock on the afternoon of October 9 the Boer republics drafted an ultimatum which threw into the face of the British government demands of such an uncompromising nature that no self-respecting major power could possibly have accepted them.

Early in the morning of 10 October 1899 these demands were presented officially to the British cabinet, who reacted with surprise and delight: “They’ve done it! They’ve given us a cast-iron case. They stand before the world as the aggressors.” That night the British government rejected the ultimatum, and when news of this reaction reached Pretoria on the afternoon of October 11, war officially
began, and troops from both sides swung into action. A handful of rural Boers had brazenly challenged the might of an empire.

But the real cause of the war was much more complex than an exchange of cablegrams over demands for arbitration and troop withdrawals. It involved the same forces that had caused General de Groot’s storming of Majuba in 1881, and those which had urged Cecil Rhodes to support the invasion of the Transvaal in 1895. The English wanted to control all of southern Africa in one grand union of states and peoples; the Boers wanted the freedom to conduct their own governments off to one side without interference from London. The English took up the case of the Uitlanders on the Golden Reef. The Boers saw these fortune-seekers as a threat to their way of life. These interests conflicted, aroused animosities, and inevitably goaded the two nations into combat.

If the Boers had not declared war on October 11, the English would probably have done so within a few days. The sanest judgment that can be passed on the genesis of this terrible war between two groups of friends is that it was the result of imperiousness on the English side and intransigence on the Boer.

Like rivulets wandering across a plain, coalescing at last to form a river, the various commandos heading toward Natal came together to create a Boer army. In time it contained some seventeen thousand men, and when they were assembled for the drive into English territory, old Commandant-General Joubert, in charge, decided to hold a review in honor of Oom Paul’s birthday to inspirit the troops and put them in a military frame of mind, so while he sat astride his horse to take the salute, the commandos galloped past, each man executing what he called a salute in the distinctive style he favored. Some doffed their big hats; some merely touched the brim with a finger; some yelled Boer fighting words; some nodded; a few shook their own hands and grinned; and some made no other gesture than a wink. But each man signified that he was ready.

They galloped into Natal, prepared to sweep gloriously down to the Indian Ocean, capture Durban at the end of their ride, and deprive the English of a port through which to bring the reinforcements already on their way from London. General de Groot, with his Venloo Commando, tried to keep near the front of the advance, for he wished to lead the gallop down to the sea.

Two heavily garrisoned towns obstructed the path of the Boers as they entered Natal—Dundee and Ladysmith—and it was De Groot’s urgent advice that they be by-passed: “Give me a handful of commandos, we’ll dash direct to Durban.” Had he been allowed to do this, he would have prevented English ships from landing reinforcements, and then, as he growled, “Without supplies, the garrisons will wither up here and we can pluck them when we will.”

But the commandant-general felt that orderliness required that he capture these two strong points: “We can’t have thousands of English troops in our rear, can we?” De Groot insisted that his charging raid to the seaport might win the war, but he was silenced with a stern command: “Take your burghers toward Ladysmith. You’ll do your fighting there.”

So while thousands of Boers peeled off for the attack on Dundee, where the English commanding general was to be mortally wounded while his troops fled south, the Venloo Commando had to swing west, abandon the brilliant concept of a dash to the sea, and make for the hills overlooking Ladysmith.

The town acquired this remarkable name because of the exploits of a dashing young officer, Sir Harry Smith, who made his historic ride from Cape Town to the defense of Grahamstown back in 1835. He captivated the imagination of the local population. Later he returned to Cape Town as governor, and was enthusiastically welcomed by “my children,” as he called the Boers and blacks. But just in case the Xhosa had any dream of re-creating the troubles they had caused him, he summoned two thousand to meet him, with their chiefs. Mounted on his horse Aliwal, he held in his right hand a brass-headed wand signifying peace, and in his left, a sergeant’s stick representing war.

The chiefs were ordered to step forward and touch the wand or the stick, indicating the course they wished to follow. Peace was the victor, but at a price: “Now, to show that you submit to me and my Great White Queen, you will kiss my foot.” They did, whereupon Sir Harry shook their hands and reported: “We have secured permanent peace.” Alas, only three years later his Xhosa children invaded the frontier yet again, and once more he had to repulse them.

Sir Harry also had his troubles with the Voortrekkers who crossed the Orange River, but the dashing governor and his lovely Spanish wife continued to enjoy such adulation that the people named a series of towns after them: Harrismith; Aliwal, honoring his victory over
the Sikhs at that place in India; and two different towns named Ladysmith, one of which Paulus de Groot and his Boers were about to invest.

Late on the second afternoon of the ride toward Ladysmith, a violent thunderstorm broke, making De Groot’s drenched burghers curse as they pushed through the torrent. He rode up front with Van Doorn, head pulled in toward chest, a bitter anger darkening his face. “Every step this horse takes,” he grumbled, “we’re farther away from the route to the sea. Damnit, Jakob! Even if we do reach Ladysmith in good order, we’ll have to wait for the rest to catch up before we can attack.” Then he voiced his real complaint: “We’re missing the battles.”

He was mistaken. Two Boer scouts raced back and cried through the pelting rain, “Die Engelese! They’re fighting our men just beyond those gullies.”

“We join them!” De Groot shouted as he spurred his horse. The commando plunged into the eroded rift in the veld, ponies slipping and sliding in the quagmire, then struggling up the opposite side. They came out on the edge of a vast plain, but the rain cut visibility; through a small telescope De Groot could barely discern a company of Boers, far distant. To his dismay, they seemed to be retreating: “Where in hell are they going? To the Transvaal?” Without waiting for an answer, he headed directly toward the fighting.

The Venloo burghers were thus projected into an experience which would go far in determining General de Groot’s future actions. To begin with, their scouting had been inadequate: the two young fellows sent forward miscalculated the capacity of the enemy force, encouraging the Boer contingent to advance too rapidly, ill-prepared for the shock the English were about to deliver. Boer losses had already been heavy and the retreat was general.

De Groot judged that swift movement on his part might halt the rout, but as his men approached, the English commander unleashed a unit which up to now had been held in reserve: four hundred lancers roared onto the plain, sweeping toward the confused Boers. When they spotted the arrival of the Venloo Commando, half the force broke away and came directly at the new target.

The Boers rarely charged an enemy on horseback; they usually dismounted, tied their ponies, and fought on foot. Nor did they like the idea of one white man stabbing at another with bayonets and lances; to them, decent warfare permitted only bullets, with stabbing
a savage tactic resorted to by Zulu and Xhosa. But now here came the English cavalry, galloping like fiends across the open space, their lances flashing in the sunlight that broke through the clouds.

It was a dreadful affray, those huge horses coming at the Boers, those long, sharp lances jabbing at the disorganized burghers caught unprepared in the open. Van Doorn narrowly escaped when a lance smacked into his saddle, jarring his pony to a deathly stop and tossing him to the ground. Luckily, he made it on foot to some rocks, but watched as a score of his fellow Boers were cut down. Because of the nature of a cavalry charge—fifteen, twenty, forty mounted men thundering one behind another along a single path—any Boer who was struck by one lance was apt to be hit by a dozen others, so that a dead body could be riddled.

The Venloo Commando was broken and scattered, which encouraged the Englishmen to launch a second and third charge. On and on they came, yelling and shouting and spewing obscenities; Van Doorn heard one young officer cry, “What a glorious pig-sticking!” His khaki uniform was splattered with blood; this was a grand battue all over again, a wild and savage slaughter.

Aside from the group of rocks in which Jakob hid, along with five others, there was no cover for any Boers who lost their ponies, so the razor-sharp lances were free to pick them off at will as they ran screaming across the veld. Some of the commando did manage to escape on their ponies, and these closed ranks with De Groot; their rapid fire from the saddle diverted the English cavalry from destroying trapped men like Van Doorn, but nothing could stop the butchery of the Venloo men.

At last the victorious lancers withdrew, having lost only a handful of their men; but when ashen-faced Van Doorn inspected the bloodstained veld he found more than seventy Boers slain, most with more than six deep gashes in their bodies; one young fellow caught in the full path of the first and third charges had been punctured eighteen times. When De Groot saw this lad—the one who had dared to dance with Sybilla, who had kissed Johanna van Doorn in the barn—and witnessed the obscene manner in which he had been stabbed, he stood over his young fighter and swore an oath: “I will destroy the English cavalry.”

He got his first chance during the ensuing battle for Ladysmith. Having learned his lesson, he used the best scouts available: Micah Nxumalo and two other blacks, who reported accurately the movements
of the English cavalry. He moved his commando as close to the lancers’ position as he could, praying that they would accept the bait he was about to throw before them: “They’ll never catch us in the open again. But let the swine think they can eat us up like they did before.”

Like an old and practiced spider, he spun his web. On five successive days he changed his guard an hour before dusk, instructing his men to walk from their posts slowly, as if weary from the November heat. Replacements were to arrive tardily and to appear listless. Six men or seven were to be visible between the tents, and there was to be desultory movement. Everything was to look like a poorly managed Boer camp, and for five days absolutely nothing happened. So he prolonged the drill, inventing new pieces of activity which would help create the illusion, and on the eleventh day the English cavalry came out again, with nearly two hundred men.

The roles given the forward actors were perilous indeed, for the thundering cavalry was allowed right into the heart of the encampment, with enough Boers running distraught to maintain the illusion, and these must be adroit enough to escape death from the stabbing lances. Two failed, and with great cries of triumph, the cavalrymen hacked them to death.

But when the sortie had passed through the camp, it found itself enfiladed not only by the survivors of the Venloo Commando but also by one hundred burghers from the Carolina contingent borrowed for this occasion, and from those grim Boers came a withering crossfire, aimed not at the lancers but at their horses. And as the beasts went down or ran wild in fury, Boer marksmen calmly shot any surviving cavalrymen. Only those who surrendered instantly were spared, and not all of them.