The Covenant (131 page)

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.”

It began with an action that reverberated around the world. It would have been a remarkable adventure had General de Groot done it alone, but it so happened that two newspapermen, a Frenchman and an American, hearing of the dissolution of the commandos now that the war was over, sought out old De Groot, thinking that he would provide a colorful story: the old veteran of the Great Trek who had fought first as a general, finally as a mere private. Also, since he had long ago been one of the heroes at Majuba, his return to civil life would be interesting to older readers.

But when they found De Groot and asked their first battery of questions about the impending surrender, he looked at them in amazement. “Can you men ride horses?”

“We can.”

“Are you afraid of bullets?”

“Like everyone.”

“Good, because I don’t like heroes. Ride with me and see how we surrender.”

He had regrouped with ninety men, mostly from the old Venloo Commando, but including sixteen older burghers from other districts who had little to go back to and wanted a chance to twist old Kitchener’s tail. They had fine ponies and, of course, the usual complement of black retainers. They also had two wagons carrying three of the wives, and when the reporters saw Sybilla de Groot, in her sixties, they gasped.

“What’s she doing here?”

“I don’t go to war without my wife.”

“But the war’s over.”

“Only the preliminaries.”

When the newspapermen finally grasped De Groot’s plan of
action, they were shocked both at the boldness and at the fact that a man nearly seventy should have concocted it.

“We want to give old Kitchener a signal that his war is still under way. He thinks he took over to receive salutes and break down the camps. He has a dreadful task ahead of him, and we want you to tell him so.”

“If you do what you threaten,” the Frenchman said admiringly, “he won’t need us to tell him.”

What De Groot proposed was to swing far west of Pretoria and Johannesburg, drop down some twenty-two miles below the latter city, and cut the railway line to Cape Town. Then, when English troops were everywhere, to gallop north as he had done before, right into the heart of their strength in Johannesburg district, there to cut the line again. Then, after a forty-six-mile gallop south, to strike the line again far from the first blow. Three nights, three directions, three strikes. It was confusing even to listen to; for an English general basking in victory it would be appalling.

Far out in the veld they left the two wagons and the spare ponies. As they prepared to ride in for their insane adventure, old De Groot took off his hat, kissed his wife, and told her, “One day, old woman … one day it will end.”

Casually, the Boers and the two correspondents rode east, calculating so exactly that at two in the morning, when guards were sleepy, they would have time in which to blow up the Johannesburg–Cape Town railway. They accomplished this with dispatch—a wild, violent eruption filling the night—then galloped at breakneck speed right toward the heart of Johannesburg, taking cover just before dawn.

All that day they watched English troops hustling back and forth, “In rather a panic,” De Groot said.

At dusk they stayed where they were, but well before midnight De Groot, Van Doorn and Micah again led a dozen burghers up to the railway, lugging a huge supply of dynamite, which they fastened to the rails, detonating it from a distance. The explosive ripped the entire rail system apart, but before the debris settled, the Venloo Commando was galloping south over back roads to their third appointment. Again they spent daylight hours watching the frustrated troops, and once more at nightfall they resumed their riding. This time they galloped till almost dawn, when De Groot said, “They won’t expect us this far south.” Calling upon his same team, he had one hundred yards of rail mined, and when the early dawn was
shaken with the vast outburst, throwing lengths of rail high in the air, the Boers retreated out over the veld, then far north to where Sybilla waited with the wagons.

The American reporter wrote a story which covered front pages in all states:
WAR IS JUST STARTING SAYS DE GROOT
. He was so factual and outlined the daring Boer strategy with such detail that the reader had to be impressed. When the report reached England a shudder passed through the nation, with editors asking soberly:
WAS CELEBRATION PREMATURE
?

But it was the French report that captured the world’s imagination, for it told of Sybilla waiting in the veld, of Paulus taking off his top hat before kissing her, of the unbelievable daring in riding right into English strength, and of the coolness with which De Groot and his men handled their dynamite. What caused the story to be remembered, however, was the happy phrase the Frenchman coined to describe De Groot and his mission:
AVENGER OF THE VELD
. It sounded better in French
(Vengeur du Veld)
, but even in English it was telling, and its effect was reinforced by something that General de Groot had whispered on one of the night rides. “He told me,” read the report, “that now that the gaudy battles are over, the real war begins. Having seen him in action for three Scheherazade Nights, I can believe it.”

Now the old man faced a different problem. All the adventurers wanted to join him, and the name Venloo Commando flashed across the world. It struck in the north. It appeared out of the mist in the far reaches of the Orange Free State. Newspapers fought desperately to catch photographs of Sybilla de Groot driving her old wagon, or of her husband standing beside her with his tall hat in his hand.

He had ninety men, then a hundred and fifteen, and finally the maximum he felt he could handle, with Van Doorn’s help: two hundred and twenty. They were the best riders, men who could load and fire at a gallop, and they had no reason to halt anywhere, for they could not return to their homes.

When Kitchener found to his grim dismay that the Boers did not intend to surrender, as a defeated rabble should, he became distraught and issued orders that the farms of dissident commando members be burned to the ground, their fields ravaged and their livestock driven away: “They may fight, but they won’t feed.”

Before he left South Africa, Lord Roberts had applied this
scorched-earth policy selectively, putting to the torch only those farms known to be collaborating with the commandos, but by the time Major Frank Saltwood was transferred from Buller’s defunct command to Kitchener’s, the practice had spread. “I really don’t think it will have much bearing upon the burghers,” Saltwood warned when he studied the figures, but Kitchener was adamant, and for the first time Saltwood saw the steel in this man’s fiber. Clean-shaven except for a distinctive mustache, trim, rigid, accepting no nonsense from anyone, he seemed the right man for the unpleasant task of cleaning up the few recalcitrant rebels like old Paulus de Groot.

“Shall we burn his farm?” an English aide asked, and before Kitchener could reply, Saltwood volunteered: “That would be a mistake, sir. Already the man’s a hero. Simply create more sympathy.” When these prudent words were spoken, Lord Kitchener stared at his South African liaison, trying to assess him: Is this man to be trusted to put England’s interest first, or is he infected with local patriotism? This time, however, what he says makes sense.

“Do not burn the De Groot farm,” Kitchener ordered, and for the moment it was spared, but when the wily old man continued to strike at unforeseen places, making fools of the English, Kitchener became coldly furious, and although he did not yet burn De Groot’s farm, he ordered a wide swath of desolation on either side of the railway leading to Lourenço Marques. As soon as this was done, the Venloo Commando swept in and cut the railway in four places, to the intense delight of the French correspondent who accompanied the raid.

This was important, because the press of the world, especially the cartoonists, turned savagely against Great Britain, lampooning both her and Kitchener as murderers and bullies. Hardly a day passed that the influential papers in Amsterdam, Berlin and New York did not crucify Kitchener, showing him as a tyrant burning the food needed for starving Boer women and children. When one of the noble lord’s English aides saw a selection of the worst cartoons, he grumbled, “Damned few of those great fat Dutch women are starving.” But the corrosive propaganda continued, until it appeared that the entire world was opposed to England’s performance in South Africa, as indeed it was, save for countries like Canada, Australia and New Zealand, which retained legal ties to the mother country.

The hero in this ceaseless barrage of pro-Boer propaganda had to be General de Groot
—Vengeur du Veld
and a cartoonist’s delight. He
was an old man in a frock coat and top hat, and he was accompanied by a woman whose stately demeanor under all circumstances had won the admiration of all newsmen. Together they formed an irresistible pair, especially when an American photographer caught them holding hands beside their battered wagon. In London a brazen Cockney paperboy bought himself a stack of white envelopes, labeled them
PORTRAIT OF GENERAL DE GROOT
and sold them for sixpence. When the purchaser opened the envelope to find nothing, the cheeky lad cried, to the delight of those in on the joke, “Damn me, Guv’nor, ’e got away again!”